nourish: Brick & Mortar General Store
Danielle Rosen writes a review of a local shop you should not overlook, with photography by Wesley Chu. (more…)
Constructing a College Town: Displacement in a Student Housing Building Boom
Evelyn Hofmann (MArch candidate) and Nick Revington (PhD Planning candidate) collaborated on a photo essay last fall recently published on the Berkley Planning Journal’s blog The Urban Fringe. (more…)
The State of Critique and Feedback at UWSA: A Report
BRIDGE is proud to play host to a report prepared by two graduate students, Mona Dai and Allegra Friesen, on the subject of critical feedback at our school. (more…)
THESIS: The River is for Washing Carpets
The River is for Washing Carpets Safira Lakhani Contemporary peacebuilding, notably as it is practiced in Afghanistan, consistently fails to address local needs in favour of international priorities for global security. Despite the significant presence of foreign agencies and aid mechanisms in the country, peace in Afghanistan remains elusive. Any semblance of peace achieved is neither durable, nor sustainable, particularly because of international ignorance of on-the-ground environmental and social realities, with specific reference to natural resource management and gender dynamics. These failures are localised in Bamyan,...
THESIS: Library: A Social Infrastructure
The Library A Social Infrastructure Parisa Kohbodi For many centuries, the mission of the library as a civic institution has been seen as the collection and dissemination of information. Likewise, the library typology continuously responds to the dominant paradigm of information and communications technologies. Following the digital revolution of the late twentieth century, information has been transcoded into electronic signals, thus allowing its storage and distribution to take place independent of time and space. Today,...
THESIS: Embracing or Not Enclosing
Embracing or Not Enclosing Caelin Schneider The simultaneously archaic and hypermodern “archetypal fact” of twenty first century architecture and urbanism will be the enclosure, the wall, the barrier, the gate, the fence, the fortress. -Lieven De Cauter I no longer know what there is behind the wall, I no longer know there is a wall, I no longer know this wall is a wall, I no longer know what a wall is. I no longer...
THESIS: The Reflexive Urban Fabric: The Re-imagining of Toronto’s Rail Corridor
The Reflexive Urban Fabric The Re-Imagining of Toronto’s Urban Rail Corridor Andrew Cole The thesis The Reflexive Urban Fabric: The Re-imagining of Toronto’s Rail Corridor is concerned with architecture’s role in shaping infrastructural systems into designed composite networks that respond to local, social, and ecological conditions. Infrastructural systems present a dichotomy between the technical and cultural influences that are inseparable from urban planning. They have been given technical priority over natural and urban landscapes for an agenda of higher mono-focused productivity, while also shaping urban fabrics...
THESIS: Mediations of Shattered Water: Environmental Intimacy & the Dissolution of the Self
Mediations of Shattered Water Environmental Intimacy & the Dissolution of the Self Kate Holbrook-Smith In a time of accelerated environmental degradation, a human-centric approach to engagement has engendered a pervasive cultural passivity towards the environment. This fatalistic detachment amplified by technological advances and, in Canada, the vastness of our landscape demands that we reanimate our perception of the natural world. Environmental intimacy aims to dissolve the “I-it” relationship through an affective merging of subject and...
Call for Submission: A Year of Things
BRIDGE is taking a look back at the last year in A Year of Things, an exhibition that frames three terms of student and academic life through artifacts of historic value. We are now taking submissions from anyone and everyone who has produced posters, graphic design, or physical objects (models or otherwise) that represent, in some way or another, the last three terms of architecture school. What will we accept? Anything you made that isn’t...
THESIS : The Other Place: Building a Retreat of One’s Own
The Other Place: Building a Retreat of One’s Own Brock Benninger How is one to ground themselves in an increasingly virtual and abstract world? The Other Place offers a complimentary environment to daily life. Here one can establish the necessary critical distance from the conditions which define day to day life, and gain the perspective required to position ones self within, or against, these conditions. Interpretations of The Other Place, beginning with the ideology of...