Architectural Graduate Thesis

Buried Landscapes

This April I completed my Master of Architecture graduate thesis at the University of Toronto (UofT) Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

My thesis was a two-term project that researched the Carrying Place Trail between Toronto and Lake Simcoe. This was an indigenous portage route that was used for thousands of years prior to the arrival of settlers to North America. When Toronto was established, the Lieutenant Governor Simcoe commissioned a military road that became Younge Street — the longest street in the world. In the process, the portage was rendered obsolete and quickly erased from the landscape by sprawling urban development.

The thesis investigated the history of the trail and under the guidance of Assistant Professor Petros Babasikas, I looked at stations along the trail as fragments of an archipelago — stories and memories under a disturbed ground.

The Archipelago Studio is based on the following assumptions:

1. We must redefine our notion of Site. Site is not a plot but a network — a mesh of actors, vectors, fields and objects. Not control, mastery, tabula rasa, but allyship, relationality, working with what we have. The urban, social, ecological crises of our time are slow and invisible, popping across the globe, across cities, in catastrophic bursts. The Archipelago method is an entry to this. It allows us to visualize and project both the field and objects of different events through storytelling, architectural drawing and models.
2. Describing a Crisis is not enough. We need to find ways to act against it. To do so, it helps to find an Agent: an organization, or synergy of institutions driving social, urban, environmental change. This agent becomes a close friend to our project, helping us reinvent its architecture. This way we also redefine our notion of Program, not as function, service, optimization, but as footprint, motivation, and impact for our architecture.
3. An architecture against, or despite, different Crises cannot save the world, but it can drive change: social justice, integration, conservation, renewal, shelter, sanctuary, public space. A thesis can be aligned with these goals. By research through making — storytelling, agent-building (activism), and re-building, it becomes a project.
4. Our architecture may engender spaces of freedom and joy. Those spaces will be memorable, our monuments against the Crisis.

To have an intimate relationship with the land requires respect and a curiosity for discovery — seeking out and learning the stories and knowledge hidden beneath the surface. The thesis asks how can architecture reclaim urbanism, alter landforms, and reconstruct landscapes to uncover history and engage with the land for a sense of place? and, how do we respect what came before and make new connections between people, community, and place for a sense of being?

Over the course of two terms, four stations at significant moments of disruption were identified that acknowledge scars in the land and catalogue different techniques for addressing disruptions in the landscape. I created four physical models for each station that represent the disruption, process of transformation, design, and atmosphere. Together, these sixteen models and their material experiments were presented in an exhibition with a film.

It was important that I curate a film as a presentation so that there would be a documentary archive of the project. Nearly every thesis project at Daniels exists for a brief afternoon but I wanted mine to exist in some form into the future.