ABSTRACT by Renee Kuehnle The outport is in the midst of great change. Twenty years since the moratorium on cod fishing, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador is experiencing rapid economic development in another industrial resource boom. While some outports are growing, others continue to decline. This development is based on wealth gained through exploitation of non-renewable resources, and as such, is not sustainable. Investing a portion of these short-term gains into the development of...
ABSTRACT by Uros Novakovic Confronted with issues, whose ultimate (socioeconomic) causes cannot be resolved through the modification of the built environment, architectural interventions may often inadvertently aid the reproduction of the problems they seek to resolve. In eliminating symptoms of social inequality, alienation and marginalization, architecture can legitimize the social order out of which they arise. In such situations, architects’ attempts to concern themselves with narrowly practical concerns are insufficient even to their own aims,...
ABSTRACT by Sonja Vangjeli In a context of rapid urbanization and increasingly standardized built environments, urbanism must find new methods of creating appropriate conditions for the variability of contemporary urban life. The city, understood as a system of interconnected processes in constant change, offers a relational way of thinking about urban design. This thesis explores the concept of Relational Urbanism through a strategic design approach that engages the complexity of the site to create variability...
Enter the School of Architecture and you may notice a subtle, black demarcation on the floor of the atrium. Traverse the stairs and you’ll find another precise curvature slicing through the second floor student lounge. Taehyung Kim is responsible for these contours, entitled Insertion which serve as a testing ground for his masters thesis. His investigations surround our phenomenological experience of space and in particular, challenge notions of ‘framing’ as discussed in architecture. For this particular work...
ABSTRACT by Laura Knap We insist upon “green space,” but the term’s vague cast brings little into focus. In this thesis I search out what it is that we look for in green space. I consider some ways, within our North American context, that we interact with it, represent it, speak about it and write about it. Drawing together evidence from a diverse range of sources in myth and mapping, poetry, classical philosophy, feminist theory, language, and personal experience, I find enigmatic but persistent geometries of...
ABSTRACT by Shannon Ross During the 1960s large trenched expressways were introduced into our urban centres to accommodate the booming vehicular traffic. These expressways were built on an enormous scale, often traversing entire cities. Unfortunately, some neighbourhoods have been divided and now share a noxious physical boundary. The Vine Street Expressway in Philadelphia, the Cross Bronx Expressway in New York and the Décarie Expressway in Montreal are examples of such thoroughfares. They are noisy, polluted...
ABSTRACT by Emad Ghattas Québec’s historical attachment with Roman Catholicism is obvious through the great amount of churches throughout the province. Changing attitudes in Québec (in parallel with other regions around the world) are leading to a chronic desertion of spaces of worship. Conceived as the heart of a community, churches successfully imposed their presence onto the built and social fabrics of the neighbourhoods they serve. In today’s context, this relationship is shifting, and communities...
ABSTRACT by Elyse Snyder I live in a society where a state of multi-tasking and over-stimulation is common. I am inundated with excessive information and seemingly addicted to distraction. My love affair with hi speed digital devices devours all sense of time and space. But in the process of making all information available to everyone, all the time, we are losing our connection with the value of direct experience. What I can see, feel, taste,...
ABSTRACT by Lindsey Nette We reached the edge of that forgotten dock and jumped, arms raised, into knee-deep grass. We wore rubber boots, and carried a camera strung to a kite. The dock was an unfinished fragment of a bridge. After crossing a dried up coulee it ended abruptly, two feet above the grass and some unknown depth above solid ground. I wondered how many tourists, after detouring hours off the highway to visit the...
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...
