Thesis Research Studio

Ever wonder what MArch thesis at UofT is like?

Last year the Masters of Architecture program at Daniels UofT switched from a self-directed thesis to a two-term studio. This meant that instead of having to determine a topic and find an advisor yourself, you were placed in a studio with a topic.

I selected Petros Babasikas as my studio professor who was conducting the Archipelago 3.0: Storytelling, Activism, Re-Building. 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.

We came to the first class with a presentation of our past work and two possible ideas for what we wanted to do our project on. I really wanted to do something in Japan but at the time I couldn’t come up with a topic in three days that met the studio brief so I looked at another important issue which was indigenous reconciliation in Canada. I don’t know much about Ontario so I thought it would be an important aspect of my education to study the First Nations in Ontario.

My topic is the Carrying Place Trail.

For thousands of years the Carrying Place Trail existed between what is now Toronto and Lake Simcoe. This land portage connected Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay and was shorter than going around the Ontario Peninsula. It connected the east coast with central America on the Parries and in the Mississippi river basin.

Sustained development has erased historic markers leaving scattered remnants in a fragmented landscape. These fragments are an archipelago — artefacts and stories lost to an ocean of time.

How can architecture enable the discovery of old values, new thoughts, and make new connections between people, community, and place?

The erasure of the Carrying Place Trail obscures a pivotal moment in history but the memory of the Carrying Place Trail remains. Layered beneath a present urban map is an existing topographic landform that has been disruptively cut. Four stations at significant moments of disruption create gathering places that recognize the land and allow people of all nations in the community to re-discover fragmented islands in the archipelago.

The studio is organized around making a visual essay or film with supporting drawings and physical models. Last week I presented my film as at the term-end review. This is the cumulation of my research through the term in preparation for the winter term where I will be making a design.

Unfortunately two days before the review the school shut down because of COVID and so the review turned from an exhibition into a zoom meeting. The online review format wasn’t able to really show off the physical models I made that were suppose to be exhibited so I created another video. I’m quite proud of how these models turned out. They’re suppose to be idea models and they served to help me understand the project better and generate inspiration for possible design interventions. In this aspect they were very successful.