Ron Sims Purchase Prize

The Cherry Beach Institute of Holography Research and Studies (1987) Tomek Wolski The Institute is positioned at Cherry Beach to transition between nature, industry and entertainment. This transition is inspired by the hologram itself, which seamlessly blends art, technology and sccience. The holography laboratories extend into the natural setting of the Cherry Beach, The researchers' laboratories aare in two main buildings. The third building includes a projection cabin to screen image onto the reversed fan-shaped holographic drive-in theater. The U-shaped ring road connects all the structures and facilities with parking alongside. The earth-man-made shapes articulate the different site zones, provide unobstructed drive-in viewing and enable pedestrian access between the port and the beach at ground level or with the use of footbridges.

The New Times Tower (1988) Martin Vahtra This project was a reaction to the Disneyfication of Times Square and 42nd Street that was taking place in the late 1980's. To be a part of the carnival that is Times Square, the New Times Tower had to be a living, breathing, spectacle of a building.

Agrarian Acropolis (1989) Tom Monteyne The setting is a 19th c. farm, preserved as a heritage site and enveloped by the sprawl of Kitchener. New buildings including a ziggurat-shaped dormitory and sunken lecture hall combine with vintage barn and apple vault. The resulting project is a rumination on the occasionally bizarre juxtaposition of settler land uses of different eras.

Eight Months Thinking About Chemical Valley/Sarnia (1990) Mary Louise Lobsinger These drawings were made between mid-May to mid-July during the eight-month thesis year. The box of drawings was a small contribution to an installation composed of distinctive parts presenting the thesis as evidence. Office file folders contained newspaper clippings and reports on the hazardous effects of Chemical Valley industries on the environment and surrounding communities; brochures advertising the achievements of the petroleum and associated industries;pamphets on safety and emergency response measures and the infrastructure of risk supporting workers and adjacent communities; and photographic documentation. I constructed: a light table for mixed media architectural drawings on X-rays (in part a petroleum-polyester product); a large plexiglass portfolio for drawings on mylar; an aluminum frame that hung inside a large window and presented final X-ray drawings; a concept-site model as well as various study models for parts of a proposed infrastructural-building. The little box of interior views required , as with every aspect of thesis, the viewer to engage directly. The presentation attempted to address the scales of infrastructural organization of a territory where above, below ground and through the waterways and the air the idea of remediation was and is impossible. In the end, the final presentation of materials attempted to grapple with the aestheticization of environmental catastrophe.

Canon No.6 (1991) Lance Kaprielian This hand drawing is the cumulative result of a series exploring the formal contrapuntal compositional technique common to the musical form of the canon. This structural counterpoint utilizes repetition, transformation and overlay to achieve density and formal cohesion. It was intended to broaden objectivity and surprise in the design process.

The Wall at Vysehrad (1992) Beth Kapusta In 1990, I ran away to newly post-Velvet Revolutionary Prague, a city grappling with its induction into modernity. The city of Havel, of Kafka, patinated with the coal dust that continued to provide warmth. I was fascinated with its ideological crossroads, and I began to draw Prague vignettes in a little mylar sketchbook using acrylic paints as if they were watercolours. This way of drawing felt true to the contradictions of the place - birthplace of multiple early modernism phenotypes of Purism, Expressionism, Futurism sharply cut short by a dark communist interlude, yet never losing its medieval soul. The drawing orthodoxy of this time in architectural education leaned to the austere ink on mylar, but I had been fortunate to have taken Ron Sims' Islamic Architecture elective the year prior - a course that was really a front for Ron to teach students the joy of exploring colour through watercolour painting. When I look at these images from my thesis, I see my struggle to render something particular to the spirit of a momentous time and place.

l’Aggeggio Albano (1993) Jeff Balmer l’Aggeggio Albano was conceived as the entr’acte for Site Unseen: An Observatory for Piranesi. Fred Thompson, told of my plans to document the ancient Emissarium of Lake Albano in the interval between the two semesters of the project, suggested simply that I ‘plan what to pack’. Built to carry out a recurrent sequence of observations throughout each of the 10 days of my visit, The Aggeggio both dispersed and collected materials accordingly. The precisely packed portmanteau comprised a camera obscura, a gridded ‘perspective machine’, rolls of kodachrome, 10-packs of polaroid film and audio cassettes, an underwater disposable camera, and a shipshape set of 10 buoys that, one per day, traversed the mile-long tunnel carved through volcanic tuff by the Romans in 398 BCE, and emerged each evening at the far end of the subterranean channel.

Refuge: investigations into light and ritual (1993) Dmytriy Pereklita The thesis was an investigation into the nature of light and ritual. The refuge itself was an abstract place: a hypothetical threshold: a space between the intangibility and ephemerality of light and physical space; a virtual place of intersection. Light was the main medium of investigation as a way of interacting and activating basic human activities of walking, eating, washing and sleeping. Through the animation of these activities via a place and contrast between solid matter and light, the aim was to elevate these basic human activities to the level of ritual. Light was both the medium of exploration and presentation. The final thesis was delivered via a slide show of photos of models and physical collages capturing light studies, with a built light box as the only physical documentation of the process.

Library Views (1994) Chris Vriend Twelve views of a large library where traditionally composed and arranged spaces are punctured and intersected with voids that represent the direct, non-linear connections between the resources held within them. The drawings, created and rendered with early 3D solid modelling software, illustrate how physical references to digital hyperlinks can physically interact with the building's architecture, creating complementary paths of exploration in a thesis building designed to bring together physical and digital content for the benefit of its users.

The Potemkin City - Excavation Series (1996) Ashley Wilson These images are an extract from the 1995 architecture Thesis Project The Potemkin City. This Excavation Series is a sub-project in response to a mid-term assignment called Landscape-Ritual Space to develop a narrative for the subject site in Toronto, where a bridge crosses the Don River

Ship/ Bridge/ Lighthouse (1997) Rick Galezowski The thesis was concerned with a section of the Don River Valley, where a rift in the city fabric exposes a wild underbelly of beauty, mystery, melancholy, and decay. A series of paintings of fantastical landscapes was used to explore tone and iconography, from which an architectural intervention would later emerge. A ship (a vessel from the past; a container of memory) is curiously stranded within a dark ravine, forlorn and unstable. In the distance, a lighthouse beckons (a paradoxical symbol: hope, safe passage, isolation, longing). Two solitudes with a desire to be united. A labyrinth of bridges draws the observer into this world, inviting exploration.

Terrain Vague (1998) Stephane Raymond Terrain Vague investigates development strategies for underused or disused urban land. Rather than master planning a full community, it seeks to set up the infrastructure and provide an armature for the development of resident directed programmes and building. By doing so it aims to provide a responsive environment that can grow organically, informed by the needs of the community. This model explores one such approach at the formely disused lands in Toronto where the Gardiner meets the Don Valley Parkway.

Du boulevard au paysage (1999) Louis-Charles Lasnier The thesis is an exploration of the possible evolution of le boulevard des Laurentides in Laval, Quebec, a typical suburban boulevard north of Montreal. Shown here are a selection of pages and fragments taken from four large format books produced as the main thesis submission, each presenting mappings, precedents/ inspiration (Shown on black backgrounds) and proposed interventions through sections and before/after collages. Special attention has been given to alternate ways of mapping and capturing the specificity of suburban living in North America. The first book deals with the idea of an inhabited forest, the second proposes a new summer and winter park, the third focuses on interventions on and adjacent to the boulevard itself and the fourth book proposes a series of leisure spaces that bridge housing and infrastructure.

O'Keefe Arcade (2000) Peter Marshall The thesis site is located along O'Keefe Lane, an alley parallel to Younge Street running south from Dundas Square in Toronto, Ontario. The core concept was to merge Benjamin's Arcades with Rossi's Architecture of the City to create typologies that activate memory in forgotten urban spaces. The thesis explores how typical mixed-use development components could be explored and inverted, forming new typologies linked along the arcade spine of O'Keefe Lane. Key visualizations include the Throat, a vertical circulation portal; the Complex, a double helix residential development; the Cabaret, an underground entertainment hub; and the Vertical Mall, an RDE space at the base of an anchor tower.

Safat Israel - The Living Machine: memorial meets urban living (2001) Ariella Kanner The Citadel is the apex of the mountain of Safat which has been built up by the accumulation of centuries of historical detritus, crushed and compressed to what stands there now. The stratum of history is a distorted memorial, standing alone untouched, full of urban potential. The Living Machine, its huge excavator, cutting and crushing this memorialized rubble and in its wake creating a city behind. To occupy the cut is to embody the history of the mound through spaces for living, working and recreation, layered vertically. The photographed model set against the backdrop of the strata of the Citadel represents a bi-sectional cut through the Living Machine, showing one of many potential outcomes to this vertical landscape.

The Creation of Organic Space Through a Study of Natural Processes (2002) Angie Mende This thesis was inspired by a love of nature and the forms which are created through the processes of erosion, decay, weaving and scarification. The site of the Bronte Creek watershed was used as the inspiration for these interventions. Each piece sought to explore ways in which architectural elements could be integrated into the landscape and become fused with it, while maintaining the tactile nature of the outdoor elements. These particular sculptures used the idea of surgical interventions to open-up the landscape, introduce foreign architectural elements, and stitch them back up into the landscape, allowing the skin of the natural environment to grow over them, eventually becoming as one. They were created using blocks of beeswax, with various metal and wire structural elements introduced, which were then covered or grown-over with the beeswax, creating bridges which grew out of the landscape.

The Long-String Instrument (2004) Dan Vrabec The Long-String Instrument was housed within the former textile factory that became the School of Architecture. The installation itself was located on the second floor of what became the School's Library, and was made up of 21 individually drawing strings, crossing from one existing building column to another at approximately waist height. The overall space of these strings is 24 meters. The strings produce tone not by transverse vibration (as in a guitar or violin); but through longitudinal vibration occurring within the material of the string itself. At 24 meters in length, the tension required to tune each string to an audible pitch becomes more than the material can physically withstand (even in terms of the strongest tempered-steel piano wire). When tuned within the upper limits of the material's tensile strength, the strings simply produce a tone so low that it is beyond the lower range of our hearing. However, by rubbing while walking the strings longitudinally, friction between the surface of the metal and a player's fingers causes a series of compression waves to form within the material, and quickly begin to travel up and down the length of the string. At a point where this movement in the string is in some way impeded, such as at the nut, the bridge or a tuning clamp, the waves reverse direction and travel back toward the player. Through continuous contact, the player sets up a cycle of harmonic reinforcement within the body of the string, causing an audible tone to be produced - a tone which Ellen Fullman describes as "similar to a bowed cello, but reedier." he timbre, or sonic character of this tone is comprised of the fundamental note of the string's tuning combined with an audible pattern of cascading overtones or harmonics, produced by the ever-changing position of the playerrs hands when rubbing the string.

The Junction City Project: Excavations and Ridges (2005) Luc Jean-Paul Bouliane The Junction City Project is a speculative design for the ‘Junction’, one of Toronto’s most complex neighbourhoods, where landscape, history, culture and infrastructure collide in a highly charged and texturized fabric fallen into urban neglect. This design is a new city centre for the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto that will accommodate upwards of 60,000 new inhabitants. The project preoccupies itself with creating an urban intervention that reflects the natural and man-made history of the site, generating a strong sense of place, culture and community, reintegrating the Junction lands into Toronto’s urban fabric. Emerging from the Geomorphic, Infrastructural, Built Fabric, History and Programme of the site, mapped and analyzed at the Scale of the Region, the City, the Community and the Individual, the woven pattern of the Hyperweave develops into a series of Excavations and Ridges from which the new city centre is born. The main Excavation becomes the Public Space Corridor of Junction City and explores the collective and indi­vidual psyche in a series of spatial encounters and narratives.  

Riparian City (2006) Jesse Dormody Riparian City investigates the integrated inhabitation of a series of layers within the synthetic landscape of Toronto’s West Don Lands. The project operates most critically at two scales. At the scale of the site, the intervention enhances and intensifies the possibility of a regenerative pedestrian relationship to a cleaner river. On a regional scale, the moves establish physical and visual connection between the extended fabric of the city and a potential new urban centre in the Port Lands.

Hollow Ground (2007) Hayley Isaacs   The thesis employs the use of four orchestrated environments depicted here, constructed to house the presentation of four video pieces. The four “galleries” attempt to parallel the conditions of a curated and constructed setting with our own elaborately manufactured reality. The films explore concepts of illusion, artifice, beauty, manipulation, control, ritual, consumption, and destruction. Each piece calls on the viewer to become personally engaged in both the footage and their physical relationship with the piece exhibited in space. The intention is to challenge the viewer’s tendency to remain unaffected by their environment, identifying the constraints put on our mind and body by our surroundings and developing methods to de-familiarize oneself with the conventional way we look at our world.  

The Girl in the Wood Frock (2008) Andrea Shin Ling    ONCE UPON a time, there lived a man, a woman, and their beautiful daughter. For a time they were happy until one day, the woman fell ill. She was dying. The woman made her husband promise that upon her death he would re-marry, on the condition that his new wife must wear her wedding ring. The man searched for a new bride, but none could be found that fit the ring. One day the beautiful daughter, in a game of dress-up, put on her dead mother’s dress and slipped on the wedding ring; to her horror, the ring fit! Her father discovered her and, honouring his dead wife’s wishes, ordered his daughter to marry him. On the day of her wedding, the father asked his distraught bride what she would like as a wedding gift. She asked for five dresses. Four dresses were to be silk, and the most beautiful dresses ever seen. The fifth dress was to be made of wood. When the dresses were completed, the girl put them on, hiding the silk under the wood. She threw herself in the river and floated away. A prince rescued the girl and made her his servant. But the prince was unkind; he treated her badly, for she wore an ugly wood frock. Her suffering was eased at night when the girl would take off the wood dress and dance, in secret, in her silk ones. The prince discovered the girl in the silk dresses and they fell in love, living happily ever after. This thesis is based on a fairy tale in which a girl’s life is changed by what she wears. In Fair Maiden Wood clothing is a means to identity. Costume is what identifies this girl as her father’s new bride, an it reveals to the shallow prince who his true love is. It is through clothing that we identify the fairy tale. But more significantly, it is through clothing that the girl experiences the outside world. The girl lives through her wood frock – it is the vessel by which she escapes the threat of incest, it is the prison that disguises her beauty from the prince; it is her armour, her cage, her temporary home.    

Making Manifest: Grounding Islam (2010) Alex Josephson The mats are residual formal echoes of the traces one makes in space during prayer. Prayer is very much a spatial act, and I wanted to understand the dynamics of this as an architecture frozen into form.

HORIZON (2011) Reggie MacIntosh Leaving Earth - never to return, a population of 2000 people embark on an unprecedented mission of exploration aboard the space ship HORIZON. The ship’s design and construction seek to preserve the population’s social, cultural, and environmental wellbeing. Nevertheless, the endless nature of their journey will affect them in ways never before experienced by humanity. These images, drawn as a part of an illustrated narrative, are crafted to convey the human experience of a settlement traveling through the cosmos. They imagine how our common thread of humanity might remain constant throughout space and time, tracing its way through millennia of experience to bind our stories together. Part of a broader investigation that explores the architectural implications of giving shape to a finite environment within a boundless site, the images cast light on our terrestrial understanding of the roots of architectural thinking.

The Map is Not the Territory (2013)  Brian A Urbanik   Thirty-three locations in pursuit of the long view, from the borders of an expropriated forty year old ghost town.

Raising Islands (2013) Chris Knight   The title Raising Islands refers to a creation myth common across Polynesian and Micronesian cultures, symbolizing the voyaging seafarers who shared these stories. In the Marshallese version, men, not gods, raised the islands from the sea, reflecting the historical transformation of the islands' ecology. This story highlights how the Marshallese shaped their environment to sustain their way of life, making it true in a cultural sense that they "created" the islands. The proposal builds on this idea, envisioning how islanders might continue this process with new technologies deployed over the next fifty years.  

Oneiric Hut (2014) Gabriel Guy   Oneiric Hut exists as a documented journey toward architectural embodiment through the act of making. Informed by a critical regionalist approach, the building experiment in Ontario's near north became an architectural rite of passage and provides an argument stressing the importance of embodied learning in the education of the architect.

ANIMA URBEM (2015) James Anthony Usas The historic fires of Berlin/Kitchener are the backdrop of the thesis, with two sites (the Foundation & Schneider's creek) Forming the stage upon which a shamanic transformation is enacted through an intuitive assembly of historical narrative, photography, archival film, newspaper articles and psychogeographical research, illuminating the liminal space between personal and collective memories.

An Infinite Sound Museum of Languages (2016) Mat Winter   A museum whose repetition of volumes continues ad infinitum, with only minor variation. Each room, sealed off from the ones adjacent, plays on repeat a greeting from one of the languages of the world; lost languages of forgotten tribes, languages of distant continents, and languages of familiar tongue, interrupted only by the sounds of their surroundings. A language given physical form, forever remembered in the echoes of repeating enclosures. This piece is from the thesis entitled Variations on a Theme of Deep Time: From Geology to Architecture from the chapter Part 1: Studies in Time, consisting of a series of autonomous explorations existing on various sites and non-sites using a hybrid of representational methods to investigate and communicate possible links between the senses, the body, history, personal memory, material memory, and earth memory.   

Vibratory Lines; Experiments in Expressivity (2016) Karine Quigley   A line is both a conceptual thing and a physical thing. It begins as a vector, or some show of force and then quickly translates into a border, or diagram. Marks on the face from laughing are laugh-lines, paper is striated with lines to write on. Lines of thought connect discourses, lines of force act on a situation. Lines are mappings of intention. The origin of the word line derives from cable or string; it is drawn out from a bundle of undefined wool and given a vector. Conceptually we draw lines between things. Lines of thought from other disciplines converge in architecture: aesthetic lines, cultural lines, and economic lines, social and political lines. In architecture we draw lines and build along them. We place vibratory lines in space - draw them on the ground and pile material on them - make brick lines, or wood lines, or fabric lines. At first these lines are drawn small and describe only a figment of an idea, very soon they are drawn at full scale and sever, connect and explicate space.This painting is one of a series of tests - tests in the fine-ness of difference, the absolute abstraction of a dividing line in space. Small variations in space pull and activate the very air around each line. More accurately, this experiment became an exercise in traces - traces left behind by the force of the conceptual lines. This first diagram has been raked through rather than built up. Fine lines, and harsh cuts cleave through the surface of the image. Rather than drawing the line, or drawing-out the grain, the surface acts as a registration of that act.

Submechanophilia (2017) Sneha Sumanth These drawings are an immersion into the stories of twenty-four offshore oil platforms off the coast of California. Their submerged metal lattices have grown into expansive and diverse artificial reefs, harboring prolific life despite the frequently assumed opinion that oil and fracking have permanently ruined the water. These drawings attempt to uncover the site's hidden rhythms through a speculation into its future life that is not governed by the limits of capitalist and anthropocentric intentions, but is instead guided by the site's forces of energy, matter and life.

Pulling Threads (2018) Katherine Holbrook-Smith   In Pulling Threads, documented encounters with waterfalls are entwined in a combined gesture, as the sensation of shattered water weaves between each of the five plates. The piece becomes a mechanism to confront the cultural perception of a hostile and “unconscious” Nature. To connect distant landscapes to the present time and place, a meshwork of entwined voices, both human and non-human, are instilled into the cast surfaces.   The pieces were created using technical mediums of photography, digital editing, computer modelling, Computer Numerical Control (CNC) routing and vacuum forming to develop the sensuous cast surfaces. These processes bring the digital image back into the material world, resulting in a new form of cast landscape detached from a geographical location while resonant with the forces moving through it.

Tracings (2019) Haneen Dalla-Ali Tracings: Unraveling Home in the Diaspora presents four textile pieces that contemplate the notion of home, post-migration. Inspired by my family’s journey from the Middle-East to Canada, the thesis examines ways in which the juxtaposition of memories and spatial encounters can explore the hybridized domestic identity of an Iraqi-Canadian, living in the suburbs of Southern Ontario. Aiming to unravel a layered perception of home today, I juxtapose gauzy childhood memories where I play in the shade of the trees in my grandparents’ garden in Baghdad, with a recent encounter with Cooksville Creek, a landscape feature adjacent to my first Canadian home in Mississauga. Within each piece, as I unravel coloured thread on a mould of the rocks at the creek, I capture the forces of my encounter with a landscape that is physically accessible to me today. Simultaneously, as I lay down each layer of thread, I dwell upon the garden I played in as a child, a place I no longer experience, yet unceasingly retreat to in my mind. As I complete each piece, I peel away the mould of the landscape, leaving only the forces of my interaction with it behind, made visible through color. Throughout the process, I negotiate the contours of my home in the diaspora, as each piece becomes a temporal, open-ended map of its terrain

Coding a Biophilic Core (2020) Cam Parkin This research develops a methodology for computationally sensing, illustrating, and utilizing avian-focused patch networks to locate and inform ecological interventions in dense urban settings. These interventions are designed to extend the range of regional avian ecosystems, promoting beneficial urbanite-fauna interaction, often referred to as biophilia. This research is in response to Toronto’s rapid densification, where in recent years, there has been a major increase of residential and mixed-use development in the downtown and central waterfront areas. Literature shows that as populations move to urban centers, there is a need for people to have access to thriving, biodiverse green space to foster mental health and environmental responsibility. At the same time, experts in landscape architecture and urbanism critique existing approaches to providing green space in cities, which often lead to sterile, ornamental lawns that limit urban biodiversity. To move beyond this approach, experts call for more dynamic and complex strategies in urban ecology. As a response, this work explores computational methods of modeling networks and habitats that are borrowed from landscape ecology, graph theory, and parametric architecture, in the pursuit of a design methodology that thrives amidst the complexity and dynamic nature of urban and ecological systems. The resulting body of work involves simulating two dimensional and three-dimensional agent movement within patch networks, populating these networks with bird sighting data, and using this information to locate and inform a variety of intervention typologies. 

The Witch's House (2021) Nikē/Vic Baneberry (they/them)   Nikē/Vic is an artist and farmer living on a co-operative land sharing commons. This illustration from their thesis work "The Witch's House" is a playful and experimental investigation of feminist architectural principles explored through narrative, writing, and drawing. This drawing is a dance through the house of the witch exploring themes of bodily autonomy, community care, and interspecies ecologies. It laid the grounds for their current work in the decommodification of land and life, commoning, disability justice, and trans futurism. 

Oil Lamp 2 / Toad 2 (2022) Isabel Ochoa and James Clarke-Hicks   Oil Lamp 2 is a ceramic light screen that utilizes tool path design to generate apertures in the wall section. In this research, an individual opening in the light screen section is referred to as an aperture. These openings are functionally graded in scale to generate light diffusion effects and regulate illumination. The tool path of this light screen generates unsupported overhangs that create sagging coils, an aesthetic feature that is commonly utilized to create ornamental 'looping' in 3D printing clay artifacts.

Sinophone Science Fiction: A Language of the Chinese Dream (2023) Quinn Zhi Li   Said scroll piece investigates an emerging international wave of fantastical literature that surfaced roughly a bit over a decade ago, the globalization of Chinese science fiction (SF or sci-fi). Underdiscussed in overseas modern discourses and always overshadowed by the worldwide glorification of Western SF works, the distinctive history, culture, social values, and political drives of the Chinese Dream (中国梦) ideology woven into the present alternative thinking and speculation for the collective visions of tomorrow. A graphic narrative that unravels the unique and complex elements of Chinese SF, boundless prospects of human civilization are explored through a divergent lens of imaginative contemplation. As modern China gradually awakens from its ancient slumber, what metamorphosis awaits our contemporary notion of dwelling, of home, and of the future metropolis?

Translations of Stone Encounters (2024) Laura Woodall   The practice of Chinese rubbings has been adapted as a documentation method to capture the three-dimensional forms of limestone fragments, which the author identifies as landmarks that anchor formative memories. Through the processes of embossing and inking, the temporal layers between the author and the stone matter are translated into the paper.