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 […]

Architectural education in Switzerland: Waterloo Architecture student Sam Oswald documents a visit to the ETH Zurich. The hill is small, by Swiss standards. Still, as the bus reaches the top, the view over Lake Zurich and the surrounding Alpen foothills is impressive. Up here is the largest part of the campus of the ETH Zurich. […]

ABSTRACT by Andrea Murphy: There are over one thousand closed ‘small’ landfills in Ontario, each with differing circumstances and potential problems. This project proposes a method of addressing such dormant sites in situ, based upon a case study in Hamilton. Of the four closed landfills within Hamilton city limits, three of them lie in the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

The reality of cities is that, no matter how designed, controlled, or planned they are, people will do as they like. They will find ways to live and move through them that suit their purposes, even if this means going against a ‘designed’ system. In the case of South Africa during apartheid, this movement was […]

On March 14, 2011 the Bloomberg Administration unveiled New York City’s 10-year comprehensive waterfront plan entitled, “Vision 2020.” Though the document follows a long line of waterfront revitalization proposals, it offers an extraordinarily profound and historically unprecedented ambition to re-establish New York as one of the world’s premiere waterfront cities by transforming its post-industrial harbour […]

Architectural designers often need to strike an uneasy balance between idealism and reality. Under most circumstances, architects are restricted by clients, budgets, and available technologies. However, divorced from traditional constraints, visionary concepts of new dwellings, new cities, and new “worlds” will spark greater forms of innovation and drive creativity for future generations. The exploration of […]