Dear Friends, We would like to invite you to the second On Empathy conversation this term. Join us on Friday, June 26th at 7 PM for a conversation on the relationship between identity, space, and making as a form of expression and research into the two. The talk will feature Waterloo Architecture alumni Haneen Dalla-Ali, Jessica Hanzelkova, and Danielle Rosen, who each tackled these questions, in their own unique ways, with their masters’ theses.…
By: Melody Chen & Riling Chen When the Bauhaus opened in 1919, it was a stark shift from the traditional form of teaching the arts. They believed that artists should return to craft and instead of the typical teacher and pupil dynamic, the school was filled with masters, journeymen and apprentices. Their philosophy was simple, students should be able to live in and build the forms that symbolize their environment. At the core of the...
Liyang Zhang‘s master’s thesis Geographies of Urban Filth rethinks the spatial and social constructs of dirt and cleanliness through an intervention at the North Toronto Wastewater Treatment Plant. (more…)
An excerpt from Victoria Ngai’s recently defended M.Arch thesis entitled “90 Minutes with the Machine.” (more…)
Land reclamation is a form of land management, common in the American Southwest, that seeks to alter arid landscapes through a fabricated re-balancing of the hydrological ledger (more…)
Masters student Mark took third place in a recent competition for designing a pavilion in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. (more…)
Samuel Ganton’s thesis wrestles with the complexity of the Maracaibo Basin through storytelling and design. Through the speculative design of a thunderstorm observatory sited near the epicentre of the Catatumbo Lightning, it asks: what kind of architecture might participate in cycles of transience and change, rather than obscuring them? How might architecture extend sensory perception and become an instrument for connecting humans more completely to the storm that is our world?
Joanne discusses the objects for dining she is currently working on, and shares what she sees as the significance of dining rituals. (more…)
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,...
What Makes a Space a Place? Waterloo School of Architecture July 4 – 26, 2017 Led by Jonathan Friedman of PARTISANS Architects, a team of Waterloo Architecture students will create a site-specific built installation on the outdoor plaza at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramics. Coinciding with Waterloo Architecture’s 50th anniversary, visitors will be invited to embellish colourful benches with mosaic tile as part of a month-long communal art-making activation exploring the scarcity of meaningful public...
