Graduate Electives

How can generative AI be used for community-driven knowledge production to build an inclusive and culturally competent architectural heritage approach for the ever-evolving Chinatown West in Toronto?
Since stability.AI’s release of their open-source stable diffusion model in August 2022, creative AI-generated images have proliferated amongst artists, architects, creatives and pop culture alike. This elective will explore the emergent implications of generative AI on architectural heritage. Students will be introduced to creative artificial intelligence and learn how to use Stable Diffusion models, text prompt engineering, and develop their own image datasets to fine-tune diffusion models through Google Collab notebooks using Automatic1111 and DreamBooth. From this introductory AI knowledge, students will leverage generative AI diffusion models to expand and critically challenge architectural heritage practices through the case study site of Chinatown West Toronto.
By first applying existing generative multi-modal diffusion models, students will uncover, discuss, and examine the biases and limitations of the model’s initial datasets, the racial and socio-economic stereotypes they harmfully reproduce, and their inability to account for a community's way of life through architectural image-making. Next, in contrast, students will develop new models for how generative AI can be used to build a community-driven vision for the architectural heritage of the neighbourhood by fine-tuning their own AI models allowing them to determine the input datasets with images, texts and meanings otherwise excluded from existing open source platforms.
The students will learn about the repeated ways in which this community’s heritage has been historically silenced, and the role that architectural heritage technologies have played in that exclusion. Against this backdrop, students will be given access to digitized archival materials on Toronto’s historic downtown Chinatowns from the City of Toronto Archives as well as UAV photographs of each building in Chinatown West Toronto. These materials will form the starting point for an alternative community database for AI training and ultimately an alternative model for generative AI-based architectural heritage production that safeguards community values and priorities against the racial-colonial displacement of speculative finance and capitalism’s property system.

What kinds of knowledge do we need to understand the meanings of our spatial contexts, to rethink and remake human connections to the natural world? In this course we study films to analyze landscape’s cultural coding of meaning and symbolism. Just as we project our consciousness into our situations, and reflect our environments, we explore how cultures embed values and meanings in landscapes. We review the natural world’s significations through human frameworks and representations that inform experiences.
Using as our lens the history of representing landscape in painting, photography, gardens, and movies, this workshop-style course visits significant real, fictionalized and mythicized landscapes in different regions of the world. In this course’s fiction films and readings, landscape and its cultural coding plays a significant role in the drama. We bring analytical tools, scholarly research, art works, cultural history, philosophy, and textual discussion to the dramatic structure and discourse of cinema (1950s to the present), to illuminate underlying ideas, symbolism, tropes, and motifs in the modern world. Each film frames a thematic world and explores its key elements, spatial relationships, depths, discourses, and symbolic forms. Not a history or survey, every week we confront a different situation and context in relation to landscape.
Cinema stages encounters between humans and the earth, including non-human aspects of the earth which modernity has excluded. The course viewings expose the cultural contents of landscapes via cinematic dramatizations of processes, movement, conflict and enactments in movies and related media, space-time artifacts. We use these complex materials to facilitate discussion of contemporary ideas and issues, relating people and other living things to places and geological and atmospheric realities, topics including wilderness and the sublime, the journey, habitats and dwelling, colonialism and social power, indigeneity and identity, war, modernity, sacred sites and religious practices, mythology and magic, environmentalism and eco-criticism, subjectivism, sense of place, encounter, the irrational, strangeness and surreality, fate and destiny, utopias / dystopias, the noble savage, representation, abjection, horror and formlessness, and more. Though this course focuses on world cinema, you will be doing a lot of reading every week, as well as speaking in class discussions. The course’s workshop-style core involves building visual and textual literacy, practice intended to foster and refine skills analyzing cultural artifacts, researching with primary and secondary sources, oral and written expression and communication. This approach requires initiative and critical thinking, collaborative discussion, and is largely self-directed, resourceful, responsive, and iterative. Completing course work should take about 8-10 hours a week. Students will watch the assigned film each week and do critical readings prior to interactive discussions. You’ll be notified on which platforms (mainly free on Kanopy through the library) films are available. While there are no textbook costs, online rental costs for any viewings not available in our library system may come to about $5 per week. Cinema depicts events that some may find upsetting. This course has a trigger warning for harsh scenarios such as violence, cannibalism, suicide, rape, murder, genocide, trauma, and cruelty. If you find some movie scenes problematic or troubling to watch, get triggered or depressed by film content, this course is not a good fit for you. Films are drawn from a diversity of countries and cultures, such as Russia, Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, Iran, Norway, Vanuatu, Australia, New Zealand, Mali, Nigeria, Algeria, Greenland, Canada, UK, USA, Italy, Mexico, Venezuela, so are not all in English.

This course will explore design at multiple scales. Building from the micro-structure of material, the process of materialization to the functioning form, this course will challenge students to design an experimental façade building component at full scale. Conceived of as a hands-on concise design project of a façade element (3DP masonry component), the course will look at Making as an emergent and non-linear design process through direct engagement with additive material processes.
Operating as a small experimental micro-studio, the course will consist of introductory/foundational lectures followed by weekly design crits and hands-on experimentation with digital clay 3D printing. This course has been developed as part of a research collaboration with Masonry Council of Ontario into innovative masonry components.
Interest in materials to inspire curiosity and a strong interest in challenging design boundaries are assets for this course.

This course offers students a better understanding of what the word "reconciliation" means for architects practicing on the lands now known as Canada. Starting from an international perspective of how design has intersected with both cultural and political oppression as well as aspirations for healing, students will learn about topics such as Indigenous rights, design sovereignty, housing, healing, and economic reconciliation.

We are all indigenous peoples of this Earth, and we need to come together in our original identities to nurture our relationships together in respectful and meaningful ways. Out of that encounter arises authentic and beautiful architectural expression.
For thousands of years the places/spaces of the Grand River watershed have hosted the occupations and cultures of native peoples. They are all still here in some identity [actual, adopted, or integrated]. The landscape surrounding Lake Ontar:io “the beautiful water” and Lake Erie are sacred to three aboriginal cultures – Wendat, Haudenausaunee and Anishnabec. In their continuing adjustments to settler encounters and migrations, the community surrounding the small village of Ohsweken on the Grand River has become the homeland of the Six Nations.
As Architects, it behooves us to understand the origins of place held in the land itself examined through the rituals of archaeological investigation and recording, and to respectfully confer with the memories of our aboriginal Elders for grounding and guidance. These are the ancient and necessary protocols out of which all design and use of materials spring most naturally and profoundly.
Here at Waterloo Architecture Cambridge the primary place in this search is located fifty kilometers south along the banks of the Grand River at Six Nations – the sanctuary of the Iroquois, or Haudenausaunee, culture today. Haudenausaunee translates “people who build the long house” imparting the culture with a uniquely architectonic identity and duty making it particularly relevant to architects. In the deepest sense, all true architecture is practiced as cultural “duty”, but to do this one must be conscious of what actually comprises one’s culture as an indigenous person.
As an Architect and carrier of Haudenausaunee blood, it is my “duty” to share with you this fundamental knowledge. Mine will be an attempt to convey an architectonic teaching through the lens of Iroquoian culture at Six Nations of the Grand River Territory.
My hope is that you will be enabled to take up these teachings, adopt/adapt them, integrate/utilize them, deeply and understandingly, in your architectural practices. This will require an attempt to help you in the recovery of your indigenous mind.

‘There is nothing more invisible than a monument.’ –– Robert Musil
‘The less memory is experienced from the inside, the more it exists through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs. ... Memory has been wholly absorbed by its meticulous reconstruction.’ –– Pierre Nora
As Musil and Nora (and others) suggest, permanent representation is not necessarily the solution to the problem of forgetfulness – in fact, permanence can lead to the calcification of memory, the first step in forgetting.
This course studies how architecture has attempted to memorialise major and often traumatic historical events from the scale of the monument to the scale of an entire city. What are the gaps between the intentions and results of the works? How are the spaces used by the public? What are the divergent forces at play in the design and production of each work? How are some designs able to speak both to the collective memory of a specific group and society at large?
On a broader level, the course asks whether transforming memory into artifice can be the best means of preserving a subject as well as the source of its destruction, whether absence can be presented in the process of design, and what role incompleteness

THIS COURSE IS ALL ABOUT DESIGN, NOT CALCULATIONS. LEARNING OUTCOMES INCLUDE AN INCREASE IN YOUR ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND HOW STRUCTURES WORK, AND DETAIL THE SAME. PORTFOLIO WORTHY DESIGN PROJECTS.
Using an international database of case studies this course examines in detail the architectural design, specification, fabrication and construction process for Architecturally Exposed Structural Steel (AESS). It references the standards that were developed by the Canadian Institute of Steel Construction. Lectures will address topics including, the AESS Category Approach, fabrication standards and practices, project communication, tensile structures, diagrid structures, curved steel, castings, pedestrian bridges, steel with glazing, steel with timber. The work of the term will use current steel based competitions to explore detailed design application of the material.
The term’s knowledge will focus on DESIGN PROJECTS that requires the students to design and detail architecturally exposed structural steel systems, connections and buildings.