Notice of M.Arch. Thesis Defence Fall 2018

Shreya Garg

Of the thesis entitled: Revitalization of the Walled City of Delhi, Shahjahanabad: Incremental Urban Development Mediated through an Urban Design Framework

Abstract:

Shahjahanabad, the historic center of Delhi, built in 1638, offers an old-world charm that fosters a culturally rich community. Also known as Old Delhi, the hustling streets, the vibrancy of the old city life and the people who live like a close-knit family, are the heart of the city.

This thesis explores the crisis of resilience of the historic city center in adapting to the rural-urban migration that has been occurring as a consequence of a transition from being developing nations to rapidly modernized ones. Shahjahanabad, being the historic center, has been at the receiving end of this explosion in population growth. Migration of thousands of people from rural as well as urban agglomerations has impacted the civic infrastructure and constantly challenges the resilience of the city.

Over the course of hundreds of years, various old mansions in Shahjahanabad have been converted to markets, workshops or sites for manufacturing industries. The change in the functional typology of the mansions is visible in the now built-up courtyards. The charm and grandeur of the architecture peculiar to its historical past is now concealed within extensive development of single family dwellings over those structures and the majority of the buildings are in a state of disrepair. They are especially prone to being collapsed during rainy seasons.

This thesis engages the practice of architecture by gaining insights through an analysis of the existing housing typology, the activities of the people, and how the historical built fabric accommodates and responds to the continuous out-migration and in-migration of residents. Through concept case studies, this thesis develops different models for housing that operate within the typological guidelines appropriate to the existing historical built fabric of Old Delhi and addresses the specific site conditions. The implementation of these models as catalysts in mediating the housing crisis also intends to recapture the lost “genius locus” of the city, which is found in the essence of the environment, the streets, the courtyards and everyday interactions. The architectural typologies engage the practice of dwelling as a means of generating an overall improvement and re-structuring of the physical environment of Old Delhi while maintaining its sense of place which makes it a UNESCO treasure.

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Connie Lei

Of the thesis entitled: Revitalizing Suburbia: Build Integrated Communities

Abstract:

Urbanization has dragged workers to the city center day after day, to get to and from work for the last century.  The intervention of the hub enacts as an alternative to urbanization of the city, allowing neighbourhoods to intensify locally.  By minimizing the need for commute, an individual’s time, energy and mental sanity are precluded from the hectic travelling.  Through analysis and trend observations, minimizing the need of commute can have macro and micro impact on the city. 

The hub addresses the issue of commute by introducing a new typology of workspaces that support the mobility of work, through locations in communities where the concentration of long distance commuting is.  To serve the changing dynamics of the workplace, the hub provides a plethora of spatial diversity to suit individual needs.  Amenities should not be a marginalized benefit.  With the blur of work life balance, the goal is to integrate leisure activities and services that support daily life. Ergo, the hub aims to cultivate collaboration and foster cultural identity for the modern dweller.  The proposal aims to support a healthy way of life and sustain growth in the revitalization of existing suburban communities.

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Shahnaz Samuel

Of the thesis entitled: Recalibrating Detroit: A Plan for Incremental Neighbourhood Densification

Abstract:

This thesis analyses factors responsible for Detroit’s past growth and delves into its current transient culture. The phenomena of its urban shrinkage is more than just a demographic shift. It is a harbinger of qualitative changes that permeate social, economic and cultural aspects of Detroit’s urban life. The phenomena of shrinking cities has challenged architecture and planning disciplines to seek a divergent role. One tasked with a quest to find urban constraints propagating its temporality, and then speculating a new sustainable urban form and a process for achieving it.

In order to halt urban shrinkage, Detroit will have to set itself on the path of urban recalibration. It further proposes an animated process, leading up to an urban model of a polycentric net with nodes of vitality to provide focal points for urban recovery of its neighborhoods. The analysis of the current urban fabric is focused on urban density, continuity, and the quality of the urban grain. In order to achieve a new paradigm, this thesis proposes a phased process for incremental densification while reprogramming its urban grain of community life and its built environment. Incremental densification is a systemized bootstrap process, flexible and adaptively responsive to urban transience and indeterminable prognosis. To achieve a sustainable urban form, each modest phase can then be incrementally implemented by the residents and small scale actors, all free from large scale corporate and speculative builders.

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Danielle Rosen

Of the thesis entitled: Still Wandering: Tales from the Diaspora

Abstract:

As human beings, we are compelled to establish relationships and develop communities; we practice finding meaning in these things. However, no matter how much effort goes into their creation, and no matter how rich they are, they are always subject to an end—what they start as is not what they become. This too resonates with all things built; the memory of what a place was, inhabits what they are, and what they will be.

My thesis is a pilgrimage: within the excavation of documents, retellings of personal accounts, and site visits, I attempt to illuminate a group of people that risk being lost to the passing of time. It is within these stories that my family is brought to life, animating the houses, synagogues and other buildings that they once occupied. It is a reminder and a celebration of transience and the value of inhabiting it, if only for a brief amount of time.

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Elissa Brown

Of the thesis entitled: Revisiting To-Morrow: A Contemporary Interpretation of Ebenezer Howard’s Celebrated Garden City Model

Abstract:

In his essay, “The Garden City Idea and Modern Planning,” Lewis Mumford heralds the Garden City as the single most influential planning document of the twentieth century.[i]  Rooted in the romantic socialist tradition, the Garden City scheme addressed the overwhelming degradation of the urban environment and the resultant decline in physical health and social morale that had occurred during the rapid industrialization of English cities.  The concept was met with overwhelming enthusiasm both at home and abroad, which generated an international planning movement in the early twentieth century.  The Garden City provided a template for town planning that ultimately resulted in the building of thirty-two new towns in the United Kingdom and many more around the world.  Howard’s model was instrumental in establishing the Town and Country Planning Association, which has had a significant influence on planning legislation, elevating the Garden City “from its origins in a cheap book…to the status of an act of parliament.”[ii]

More than a century has passed since Ebenezer Howard first proposed the Garden City.  While the worst of the insalubrious conditions of the industrial city have dissipated, a new and equally formidable environmental crisis has arisen that emphasizes human impact on the environment and the central role humans have assumed in shaping the planet.  A critical analysis of the historic Garden City reveals a complex urban form whose guiding principles share an almost surreal affinity with contemporary sustainable planning, perhaps making it more relevant to present day than any other time since its inception.  This thesis explores the potential of the celebrated Garden City model to address the unfolding environmental crisis of the twenty-first century.  With the aid of contemporary ecological theories, the model is reinterpreted and updated to respond to the current environmental crisis.  The result is the twenty-first century Garden City, that demonstrates a new highly adaptable urban framework that structures relationships between the man-made and natural environments.

Through the exploration of the Garden City, a methodology is developed for the study of historic precedents.  By challenging the model to respond to the twenty-first century crisis, it is first deconstructed and evaluated, and then reconceptualized toward contemporary interests.  This method of approach suggests that an historic model maintains something of value that can be offered in contemporary times.  It provides an alternative way to study and learn from historic models, while projecting their values in to the future.

[i] Lewis Mumford, “The Garden City Idea and Modern Planning,” in Garden Cities of To-morrow, ed. Frederic J. Osborn (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 29.

[ii] Ebenezer Howard, To-Morrow a Peaceful Path to Real Reform, Original Ed. with Commentary by Peter Hall, Dennis Hardy & Colin Ward (London; New York: Routledge, 2003), 185.

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Currim Suteria

Of the thesis entitled: Faith and Architecture: Designing from the Heart

Abstract:

This thesis is about faith as foundation for the practice of architecture. In the esoteric interpretation of Islam, the intellect, also known as the “eye of the heart”, is the source of all aesthetic and ethical decisions. The heart is seen as the locus of knowledge nourished by the infinite wisdom and love of God.

In this thesis, I humbly share moments of beauty and goodness experienced during my time travelling in Northern Pakistan and studying in Cambridge, Ontario - these moments point to and serve as an affirmation of the Absolute – His signs in all the horizons. Alongside these writings, I worked on reimagining a bench, the design of a box for dried apricots, windows for an apricot orchard, and the design of a small shade garden in Karachi. I moved between working on these, and drawings of precedents and prospective projects – all of these touching each other, being connected.

In the end, this thesis speaks to the joy and love experienced when one works from a place of submission to God. One is embraced with knowledge that allows us to design and make decisions for a better and beautiful world - a reflection of the Hereafter.

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Jeffrey Kwok

Of the thesis entitled: Emergent Hybridity, Cyborgs in Architecture

Abstract:

This thesis examines architectural test-beds as an experimental and contemporary mode of creating architecture that realizes the potential of many of the connections and complexities found in living systems.  It builds on the lineage of research from the Hylozoic Ground Environments and the notion of the chthonian, embodying the potent, hidden, and essential ingredients of life.¹  From the notions of geotextiles and cyborgs, a new conception of architecture is uncovered at the scale of material compositions, wearables, and tensile structures in architecture.  After a survey of precedents as well as their concepts, design processes, and cross-disciplinary inputs, the thesis concludes with the design of an interconnected human body that is, an expanded human physiology connecting body, site, and surrounding structure in the form of public space in the alleyways of the North Point Lowlands, Hong Kong.  The design departs from the North Point Lowland’s reclaimed and constantly rehabilitating site features to generate a coherent public space.  The design proposal utilizes bifurcative qualities found in living matter, solar energy, and physiological processes to inspire a physical structure and its inhabitants.  The design proposal is a co-generated physical form arising from a moment of feeling peaceful and emergent while experiencing the hybrid qualities of life in the alleyways of Hong Kong, North Point. 

1. Beesley, Philip, Rob Gorbet, Pernilla Ohrstedt, and Hayley Isaacs. “Introduction Liminal Responsive Architecture.” In Hylozoic Ground: Liminal Responsive Architecture, 12-42. Cambridge, Ont. Canada: Riverside Architectural Press, 2010.

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Allegra Friesen

Of the thesis entitled: The Importance of Place: A Role for the Built Environment in the Etiology and Treatment of Problematic Substance Use

Abstract:

Faced with the growing North American drug crisis, and in light of the history of ineffective or even harmful approaches to treating problematic substance use, it is time to examine the problem from a new angle. There is a significant undercurrent in both the history of problematic substance use treatment and research into problematic substance use etiology that has thus far been overlooked: the role of the built environment. Based on research gathered from the fields of addiction, architecture, human geography, planning, psychology, and neuroscience, the concept of place is proposed as a new paradigm for foregrounding the built environment as a key factor in the etiology of problematic substance use. In addition, the process of place-making, as realized through participatory design in architecture, is proposed as a new component of problematic substance use treatment.

To knit together the seemingly disparate topics of problematic substance use and the built environment, Part 1 of this thesis first uncovers the spatial undercurrent in problematic substance use treatment and etiology research, including a greater historical correlation between etiology and spatial management than between etiology and treatment, and briefly examines the accepted, superficial intersection of problematic substance use and architecture.  Next, the concept of place is leveraged to draw together research from the fields of architecture, human geography, planning, psychology, and neuroscience, summarizing the influence of the built environment on human wellbeing broadly.

Part 2 intersects the fields of place and substance use through a literature review, and generates four recommendations to establish place as a new paradigm for understanding the etiology and treatment of problematic substance use.

Part 3 explores the current state of one method of placemaking, processes of participatory design in the field of architecture, as a first step to realizing the new support and treatment process proposed in Part 2.

Finally, Part 4 proposes an architectural conclusion through a speculative typology for the support and treatment of individuals experiencing problematic substance use and co-occurring homelessness.

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Aerin Cartwright

Of the thesis entitled: Real Mixed Use: Combining Living and Production on Underused Historic Industrial Sites to Resist Gentrification

Abstract:

Changing economic conditions and production requirements have caused manufacturing and other secondary industries to move away from the urban core of mid-sized cities in Southern Ontario, such as London, Hamilton, and Windsor. As industry relocates to the periphery of these cities or out of the city altogether, it leaves behind pockets of vacant industrial land that are not being used to their full potential. The hollowing out of industrial areas in the urban core is especially interesting because it corresponds with a devaluation of the surrounding residential neighbourhoods, which have become in the past few decades the lowest income areas of these cities, as economic polarization increases. There is also declining population trend in these inner-city areas, in favour of new suburban residential development on the periphery. While these vacant areas often can be seen negatively because of the uncertainty and loss that they represent, eventually due to the seesaw of uneven development these sites reach a state of underdevelopment such that they become appealing and profitable to redevelop often resulting in gentrification and the displacement of the existing residents.

This thesis aims to highlight these sites as spaces of possibility in a period of transition that have the propensity to be transformed through re-investment. This propensity will be guided by proposing an alternative to the seemingly inevitable gentrification that often occurs when devalued industrial sites are redeveloped. Typical redevelopment involves transitioning an area away from industrial uses in favour of purely residential and commercial uses. Instead, more intense mixing of traditionally conflicting uses is explored as a strategy for resisting gentrification when redeveloping. The goal is for this to be accomplished by confronting industry rather than erasing it in three main ways.

1. retaining the industrial nature of the site as much as possible and creating productive adjacencies between residential and industrial land rather than completely separating land uses,

2. remediating the land using phytotechnologies that allow people to engage with the process of remediation, and

3. supporting the existing working class population by focusing on the affordability of new residential units, and addressing the needs of the existing community rather than appealing only to market forces.

This idea is explored through the design of a campus of live-work housing and facilities that support small scale food production in a historically industrial neighbourhood east of downtown London, Ontario.

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Suhaib Bhatti

Of the thesis entitled: Displaced and Urbanized; Or Why we Build

Abstract:

I embarked on this research with the aim to study the relationship between the city and the flood, understanding the waterfront as some blurred edge where wild and human forces mix. My hope was to propose a design strategy for urban waterfronts, which define a critical border between the order of the city and the chaotic, disruptive force of the flood. Initially, I wanted to outline some toolkit which could be applied to the unique conditions of any urban waterfront of the world. It became clear that I would need to choose a site amongst hundreds of cases, otherwise my brief studies of the globe’s urban watersheds would remain relatively shallow. For a number of anomalous reasons, I settled on the Indus Valley and its watershed, together composing one of Earth’s most violent landscapes.

The more I studied the valley for symptoms, like a doctor looking for the underlying conditions of a place, the more I realized that the kind of design method I initially hoped to uncover would be impossible. To adequately frame the chaotic valley would prove to be enough of a challenge. Any constructed timeline would have its gaps, and any design to solve the plethora of urban or water issues in the Indus would need a plan of execution which would border the fantastical or horrific, for the valley consists of a series of wicked problems which generate further anomalies with any solution. Any prescription is temporary and comes with much uncertainty, especially in the Indus where the average economic value of each citizen is measured under $6000 per year, leaving many citizens with little agency and room for long-term investment.

I began trying to conceptualize the valley through its history of catastrophe, constantly reconfiguring fragments until the gaps in the valley’s narrative became the main markers of an alternate history defined by anomalous forces that re-structure society. This research unifies fragmented histories of the valley towards a critique of dominant paradigms of space-making, identifying the need for alternative practises of architecture that can anticipate or cultivate the transformative and anomalous nature of civilization.

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