This project asks whether it is possible to represent sound through the medium of architecture and site design. Through the medium of exterior exhibition and performance spaces, the design explores ways within which the non-hearing population could have their senses activated through moments of haptic enhancement as well as vibrational tectonics. The site chosen for this study holds potential to extract and probe the latency of site conditions such as wind, water and seasonal change to place a higher focus on tactility of materiality and construction assemblies. The goal is for these sound experiences to reside within highly concentrated sensory encounters between the non hearing and hearing population.

This shared tower examines the relationships between property ownership andtenant empowerment by proposing a 15-storey housing development aimed to fostercommunity connection located in False Creek Flats, Vancouver.

This development works within the current Canadian ownership context to proposea combined housing co-operative and housing society which would provide analternative way of living and owning. The tower counters the model of strata andfreehold ownership, which isolates households.

The design sets to accommodate a diverse range of households by providing variousunit types with different kinds of access to shared communal spaces. The intention isto challenge normative living and owning practices by proposing a housing typologyand design strategies which can facilitate community connection and equity.

The porch is a cultural trope serving as a significant threshold - not only as a space of transition to pass through, but also an invitation to a convivial occasion. Although linked to an idealized past, the social structures that accompany this archetypal form suggests a broader discussion of the types of spaces that support a community and build social value.

Places Between Spaces investigates the slightly bereft landscapes of St. Clair Avenue in Toronto as places of opportunity for building social capital. Whether enveloped in for lease signs or awaiting redevelopment, there is a period when these spaces are left abandoned - stripped of material and human activity. How might these provisional spaces find a material expression?

Structured around three sites characteristic of St. Clair’s urban context, the proposed interventions deliberately engage the temporal framework in which they operate.These three provisional installations are intended to provide a catalyst that engages with the public realm, providing both a shelter and destination to the community.

Life is bizarre. Yet, we want justification. As humans, we have an inherent urge to search for meaning in things that happen in life and in the things we do. This logic applies to the architectural world, where designers are always seeking evidence and looking to precedent, attempting to operate in an iterative and logical design process.This thesis develops a design methodology inspired by Surrealism, Theatre of The Absurd, and Creative Salvage to liberate us from the ordinary and introduce the revolutionary.

The words “nature” and “city” present an archetypal conflict that all urbanists experience. Urbanization is the single most significant catalyst for evolution right now. Cities cause populations to be isolated, and their sizes reduced, causing reduced gene flow and genetic differentiation and intensifying the effects of genetic drift. Urban evolution, wild organismal evolution in the urban environment, is at the frontier of evolutionary biology. It has the potential to stand at a fascinating multi-disciplinary crossroad, enriching the field of architecture with emergent yet incredibly potent new research themes with urban habitat at the center. By anticipating the emergence of nonhuman species in cities and their integration with our city life, architects can design more sustainable cities. This thesis looks at the built environment through the lens of nonhuman species as equal citizens. Decentering humans in architectural design to create a reconciliation of humans with nature.

If all members of a species of toad are in a tank, is the tank their habitat? To scale up this premise, the global nature of the climate crisis puts all ecosystems in an artificially modified environment, one giant tank. There is no wilderness left and no true wildlife.Yet there are still fish climbing ladders and polar bears in jail. With breeding programs, park preserves, etc. a growing number of species exist in habitats maintained wholly or in part by artificial intervention stamping the hallmarks of industrial society indelibly on the surface of the earth. In these circumstances, interference with these species is not only acceptable but desirable. Picking a specific case, the advance and retreat ofthe circumpolar boreal forest requires a gargantuan response and intervention. At this scale, the only tools available are those of industrial mass production creating a new ecology that is both radically different and hauntingly familiar to the extent that the very species it sets out to support are no longer themselves. Neither, for that matter,are the human occupants of the territory tied as they are through structures to the world around them.

Stuck indoors, we have been forced to reacquaint ourselves with the spaces inside our homes. This thesis looks to the vastness of a small room as a means for escape.

In the recent decade, there is a renewed interest in wood construction across disciplines. Architects, engineers, and fabricators are exploring new ways of using wood by engaging the recent advancement in digital design and fabrication.

This thesis is a reflection of my interest in tectonics and connections. It explores and proposes a generalizable system for creating a double-curved gridshell structure, robust enough at the size of a full-scale building. Through the study of different joint systems, a joint system is designed, and an open-source system (a script) is developed to automate the design and fabrication of a generalizable gridshell that can be applied to a flat, single-curved, or double-curved surface. This gridshell only utilizes planar ready-made engineering wood, a 7-axis industrial robot, and should not use any formwork for bending the material. This system enables architects to easily design and build double curved surfaces. Therefore, it increases access to complex and lightweight structures through an integrated design-to-fabrication process and material-informed forms.

Life is bizarre. Yet, we want justification. As humans, we have an inherent urge to search for meaning in things that happen in life and in the things we do. This logic applies to the architectural world, where designers are always seeking evidence and looking to precedent, attempting to operate in an iterative and logical design process.This thesis develops a design methodology inspired by Surrealism, Theatre of The Absurd, and Creative Salvage to liberate us from the ordinary and introduce the revolutionary.

Inoculating Architecture manifests itself as a series of interventions designed to recalibrate huamn society's relationship with natuure in an effort to promote the mediation of environmental damage using Vancouver landfill as a test site. The interventions are constructed with the aid of waste consuming fungus to convert humanity's discarded materials into organic building components capable of curtain the demand on extracted natural resources within the construction industry. The site's public amenities are focused on brining human society closer to the natural processes that support our everyday life by creating opportunities for the public to engage and interact with the remediative process facilitated by mycellium production.

The nomadic family demographic requires a unique architectural strategy to adequately support their growing community. The ambition of this thesis is to attempt to establish a symbiotic and mutually beneficial condition between these travellers and the local urban fabrics which they explore. This is achieved by inflecting local typologies to accommodate the nomadic families’ unprecedented programme and lifestyle.

Each of the residences is an experiment to prove the capacity of traditional typologies across the globe to accommodate the nomadic families’ unprecedented programme.They individually take into consideration the influences of site, scale, and the ability to retain local influences and culture, and how those might be applied architecturally to the spaces. While providing Nomadic Families with a comprehensive and supportive housing strategy, collectively this proposal also suggests a broader approach for ongoing architectural intervention that accommodates a mobile and global population.

The Holocene Extinction is upon us—species around the world are dying at an extraordinary rate, earning the designation of a mass extinction. In the expansion of our own habitat, the built environment, humans have transformed the planet according to our ethics and desires, wielding the power to both improve and destroy places around us. The built environment is a record of our treatment of other species, a collective project shaped by ideologies, aesthetics, and economies. Architecture and landscape architecture are complicit in the phenomenon of extinction, responsible for normalizing the designs and ideals that have contributed to the decline of other species and cultures.

This thesis examines the historical relationship of the built environment to biodiversity in three local sites of conflict: the captivity of cetaceans, the hardening of the coastline, and the protection of deep-sea environments. Each history is followed by an intervention presented as a critique of existing practices, speculating as how we might realign both our values and the built environment in response to mass extinction.

“Commodity fetishism […] reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.”

Midwives provide holistic care to women and partners throughout all the stages of pregnancy and birth. This service should be readily accessible to those living outside of urban centres. Currently in Northern BC, this is not the case for a vast majority of rural and Indigenous women who live remotely. Having to travel thousands of kilometres to access care, and also to merely give birth, this project aims to aid those most in need by offering a basic solution to their birth: a space.

By implementing modular, self-sufficient Birth Pods to these remote sites and communities, local midwives would be able to readily care for women in a private,secure, and focused setting during the prenatal, labor/delivery, and postpartum periods. The goal for this proposal is to bring the most naturalistic act of life – birth – back to these communities.

Walk around a city and you’ll notice towers, banks, churches, and monuments of the past. But what do you notice about the everyday people of the past?

There are currently plans to allow public access to parts of a large wetland north of present-day Coquitlam. Widgeon Marsh Regional Park will have the highest conservation value in the entire regional parks system and this project seeks to create spaces that provide opportunities to convey its eco-cultural significance to settler visitors. I chose three sites that could potentiate transformative learning based on their history and context. Transformative learning occurs when a disorienting dilemma catalyzes a re-examination of belief systems, and precipitates changes in behaviour and worldview.

In recent decades, the idea of “nature” has shifted from being an enemy that must be tamed or domesticated, to at best, a resource to be exploited. This thesis aims to strengthen the relationship between the built and natural environment by designing in symbiosis with nature and introducing a philosophy of care.

This proposal focuses on one of Canada’s ecosystems at risk, known as the Garry Oak ecosystem. The hundreds of species encompassed in this complex bionetwork are examined to better understand their potential to work in collaboration and help each other by exchanging resources within a human dominated landscape. This thesis argues that “nature” is an inclusive system of which humanity is a part of, and our buildings must reflect this connectivity.

Environmental gentrification is a growing complex phenomenon that reshapes the lives of urban residents by promising to eco-consciously connect its inhabitants to nature while displacing and excluding its most economically vulnerable populations. Urban greening is often sold as a public good, with the promise that it will improve the quality of life for all citizens; however, these benefits are not equally distributed, and these promises neglect the social struggles behind the creation and transformation of urban green spaces. Studies revealed that sufficient green spaces are unevenly distributed within cities, and that low-income and marginalized individuals and people of colour, often live in areas where the green space is small in size, low quality, and poorly maintained.

This project is about providing an opportunity for a playful and calming experience away from the routines and stresses of everyday life, especially due to lifestyle changes after COVID-19 outbreak.

The goal is to take people who enter the structure on a journey where they leave a little calmer, a little more excited and fresher.

Movement is key to the project. The design takes people through a 3-dimensional labyrinth on intertwined ramps, giving them opportunities to have their unique adventure by changing paths and encountering enticing views and inspiring scenes of art while allowing them to take moments of respite in between and enjoy casual performances, as well.

While providing a framework around a physical-virtual journey, through art installations as well as performing arts along the ramps, the project itself can be seen as a vertical garden of lights and colors, especially at nights when the building appears as a glowing beacon in a narrow lot in downtown Vancouver.

While the project was inspired by the outbreak of the pandemic, it can be said that such constructs can still affect the society after the emergency is over.

An alarming life-threatening crisis is expanding in our cities: loneliness. It is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and can be twice as deadly as obesity. In the meantime, The World Economic Forum recently announced a campaign to grow, restore and conserve one trillion trees to combat our planet’s climate crisis.

In considering how landscape design might support place relationship building, and in the context of the global tree planting demands, I am interested in how I might leverage the symbiotic relationship between people and trees: how they each suffer with loneliness, and flourish through social connection and community; how trees arerevered; and how they provide grounding or a sense of harmony.

I aim to bring a perspective to how landscape architects approach the design of urban spaces through addressing a growing social crisis. My combined interventions of parklet, nursery, grove and mini forest nodes can create a critical patch work of urban forestation and rewilding through our city, at the same time ameliorating the experiences of loneliness for both people and trees.

While informal settlements currently house over a billion of the global population, this project is situated in Caracas, the capital cityof Venezuela. Caracas has a population of over 3 million inhabitants of which half of that population lives in spontaneous settlements that face disproportionately higher levels of violence, marginalization, lack of basic services, poverty, and low education levels. How can the living conditions of these communities be improved? While the solutions are multifold, this project takes on a spatial response to the issue of violence in informal settlements. Specifically, spatial interventions in the public realm targeting children’s social and physical safety to reduce the risk factors that force children into criminal activities as their only means of survival. These spatial interventions arepresented as a toolkit consisting of typological interventions of different scales (S, M, L, XL) in the following categories; Food security, recreation, mobility, and childcare.

While rural communities in Newfoundland are discovering a new economic life in aquaculture, a lack of housing, an aging population and the monopoly of these same aquaculture companies limits who can live and work in these towns. Although jobs exist in aquaculture in these communities the lack of housing and alternative job opportunities means that new families are unlikely to move to these towns, leaving a serious gap in the working population. What we can foresee is, though these towns are thriving now, without an influx of new, younger, residents, the current economic spike is likely to be short-lived. Using the community of Hermitage as a testing site, this thesis proposes a solution to the problem of resiliency in rural Newfoundland communities. A live/work area within the community will be a stimulus for new growth, providing much needed housing, and on-site space for micro-local economic development, and office space for those residents working from home. Further, this new project will draw in and welcome existing residents to shared community space.

Lebanon is a country that hosts millions of refugees. Since 2011 the influx of Syrians has caused severe demands on limited infrastructure and a vulnerable economy, resulting in local conflict and the enforcement of strict policies for immigrants within Lebanon. Lebanon’s national policies act as tools of geo-political control that strictly enforce the concept of decampment of Syrian refugees within the country and encourage premature returns to Syria. These policies eliminate the potential for individual autonomy for vulnerable populations to create safe shelters or find safe refugee in the host country. Using the informal Syrian refugee camp as the primary condition of investigation, this thesis explores the potential of using a digital research methodology to conduct distanced site analysis as a method for foreign designers to participate in humanitarian design for remote or inaccessible sites of conflict.

I live in a small studio unit apartment across from another multi-unit complex. In here, I have one big window that takes up an entire wall in this tiny space. Over the last three years, I have developed a habit of looking out of the window - which makes me a voyeur.

One day, I realized that all I see are windows with giant glasses that act as walls. Windows became so mundane and uninteresting.

This thesis wants to reimagine the new urban residential facades through a series of window designs.

Churches still act to this day as symbols of a system of institutional repression for a majority of Quebec francophone population. To overwhelm this symbolism, this project imagines a province-wide program of adaptive reuse for a selected group of the multiplying abandoned Roman Catholic churches and turns them into mental health support centres.

To do so, this thesis isn’t a conservation moment, but a decidedly new response to this symbolism. It allows the symbols, that the population associates now on a cultural level with, to remain at the same time as making room for decisively new cultural anchors. Both programs now coexist side by side

Canada’s Indigenous communities are at a disproportionately higher risk of living with deficiencies in their water systems. Federal government led programs have failed to address the fundamental, historical issues found in these communities, and year after year have left many Indigenous communities without safe or reliable access to clean drinking water. To achieve sustainable results requires a holistic understanding of these communities, combined with site and community-specific interventions.

Architects have the research capabilities and representational tools at their disposal to present a clearer picture of the water crisis. By using these tools to properly understand the issues contributing to the crisis, this thesis posits that architecture has the agency to propose informed, site-specific design strategies that truly work towards the goal of providing Indigenous communities with sustainable access to clean drinking water.

Given the need for site-specific design strategies, this thesis proposes a framework of engagement with Indigenous communities to work towards solving this long-standing issue and ensure all Canadians have access to clean drinking water.

Poor acoustics, lack of privacy, and plenty of distractions are only some of the reasons why knowledge workers choose to be out of office. No, they are not on vacation. They are out of office to focus. Knowledge workers are sick and tired of constantly hiding in headphones within an over-collaborative environment. By conforming to the unilateral open-plan layout, companies and management have failed to recognize that all workers perform differently and have individual preferences.

Out Of Office advocates for the workers’ agency and community engagement to bring life to work-life balance. Task-based work within biophilic environments will replace the open-plan office and reject the century-old concepts of scientific management.

We humans tend to see ourselves as dominance over the animal others. We perceive animals according to our own preferences and make decisions based on their values to us. This human-centric value judgement of animals has led to many controversial decision-makings on animal issues.
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For example, the extermination of certain animal species for the seek of biodiversity has raised a heated debate between the animal advocates and conservationists.

I also began to wonder, how and why we made the decision choosing one animal over another.

Hotels are perhaps the most quintessentially Canadian building typology. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hotels played a central role in the development of this country, in conjunction with the transcontinental railroad. This was part of a conscious effort by the Canadian government to promote a sense of unity from sea to sea and to consolidate the fragile territorial claims of the new country.

Tourism, regardless of whether it is domestic or international, can be instrumental in creating, withinthe public consciousness, a sense of identity attached to a place. However, over the past century the concept of Canadian identity has evolved beyond recognition, becoming increasingly complex and nebulous. What if we were to re-examine the 19th century concept of the Hotel as an embodiment of Canadianess, but from a 21st century perspective?

What if we lived in a world that celebrated menstruation?
A world that revered its life-giving power?
A world where periods were a source of pride, not shame?
A world that offered greater support and comfort throughout the menstrual cycle?

Today, new empires of technology emerge to remake the city for their gain. They adopt narratives of sustainability, resilience, and a utopian belief in the possibility of improving life through technology. Through this lens, the city becomes a programmable space, reduced to solutionist terms, where the messiness of urban life can be understood and logically optimized with enough data. While this claims to be in favor of innovation and improvement, these developments often benefit from and further existing power structures. They obscure environmental and social impacts through tools of sleek aesthetics and words like ‘the cloud’. In reality, cities built by the cloud are shaped by a controlled, exclusionary logic. They are designed around enclosure, centralization, monopolization, and the commodification of urban life for corporate gain.

This project proposes moments of resistance that celebrate friction, complexity, and community at Amazon’s corporate headquarters in Seattle.

In the 3rd century BC, the first rice seedlings in Japan were gripped by human hands and tucked into a marshy pillow of soil. It was in these quiet moments where Japanese culture began, amongst the rice paddies of the countryside. Today, the rising sea levels induced by climate change threatens these rice paddies, and therefore, culture and community.

This project imagines a possible future for outlying countryside landscapes and their inhabitants to create new relationships with each other and rediscover their local identity and culture amongst climate change. Ecological and demographic change are trajected and dissected factors in the future of the chosen location, the most notoriously isolated and abundantly beautiful island of Sado.

This thesis is a personal project that aims to explore a different way of seeing and approaching a site through drawing. This project aims to weave together a reflection of my working process and intentions with the factual discoveries I made while excavating the histories of a specific site.

Space has long been seen as being a monolithic whole, a monolithic hull which is grounded in the perception of four walls. Space, however is not quite so trivial, not quite so clinical. Instead, it is an entity of many: beings, forms, phrases, phases, scales. It is not confined nor defined by its boundaries but rather by its intestines; itself a being. This is a story of an x-ray of Itself, in time and through time, with scale to itself and to others. And in a world where everything is known, perhaps space is an active, abstract Unknowing Known.

Welcome to Apartment 432.

Technology has changed our landscapes forever. These technologies allowed for mass production and blind consumption on scales that were previously unimaginable. This shift towards a more efficient, and productive mode of producing has fundamentally changed our relationship with, and understanding of our landscapes and products we consume.

This project seeks to explore what happens to existing landscapes and people once technology has effectively replaced it.

School architecture has traditionally reinforced a didactic, teacher-knows-all learning model, limiting student engagement, creativity, and autonomy. With the emergence of more progressive pedagogies, the contemporary academic focus is slowly shifting from product to process, offering opportunities for collaboration and customization within the secondary school curriculum. The model of place-based learning embraces connection between students, their environment, and the surrounding community, recognizing that learning is both context-dependent and an inherently social activity.

Within this framework, this thesis explores the interface between a secondary school and community centre in Vancouver’s West End – one of the city’s densest neighbourhoods. This thesis questions the fundamental role of the public secondary school, reimagining it as an essential piece of community infrastructure within its neighbourhood. This centre is positioned as a truly public facility, eschewing the school’s traditional hermetic boundaries in favour of a porosity aimed at cultivating human connection.

Let’s revisit suburbia.
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Two written texts guide us: a set of Homeowners Association Rules as found, and the narratives of its residents. What emerges from the conflict between the two is a series of unapproved architectural artifacts.

While overlooked or outright rejected by today’s starchitect-focused architectural discourse, suburbia is worth our attention. But suburbia, and the rules which govern it, should neither be preserved in perpetual stasis nor demolished in favour of something brand new: it should be revisited, reinterpreted and amended.

This project began as a question about the value of beauty and aesthetics in architecture, and if a discussion on such subjective ideas still has a credible place in architectural discourse.

The project now finds itself with even more questions rather than answers.

The site is in Vancouver, a city of rain.

Since the mid-1980s, numerous rural Chinese migrated to the cities for job opportunities created by the government’s economic reform policy. In 2019, China announced that the number of these rural migrant workers has reached near 300 million. Such a massive migration from rural to city driven by economic development has never happened in Chinese history. The rural Chinese live an agricultural life with their family members from generation to generation. This tradition has tightened each individual to their ancestral home. It is not hard to understand these rural migrants eager to go home. Their homesickness even worsened with an increasingly stressful and costly urban life. As the first bunch of rural migrant workers reach retirement age, they are now moving back to live in their rural homes, which has brought plenty of potential house regenerations in the Chinese countryside. With this context, the thesis proposes a house regeneration for my family in my hometown village to explore how the house transitions from a traditional prototype to a contemporary interpretation.

Locked out of Lasserre, displaced to my bedroom interior.
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Navigating the associative interplay between two spaces.
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An accumulation of recorded encounters.
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New interpretations of the perceived.

In our modern western society, death is taboo, and dying presents the sequential loss of what we uphold as the ideal human qualities: vitality, beauty, physical and economic independence. The shame this imposes on the dying and their caregivers creates isolation and segregation at a time when support is most needed. The dying person can experience a social death before a physical death. Current hospice architecture reflects our collective fears by masking itself in a veil of greenery or disguising itself unobtrusively as a domestic residence.

In contrast to our fears, the Hospice philosophy is one of the most modern and compassionate facets of healthcare. The modern hospice movement was established in 1967, and was then, as it is now, revolutionary in medicine because the patient is treated not only for their physical distress, but also for their emotional, spiritual, and social pain. The hospice is as much a holistic philosophy as it is a space, and it is one based on compassion and acceptance.

How can design reflect the compassionate perspective of the hospice philosophy? Is it possible for architecture to help dismantle the taboo our society carries toward death, and in so doing, offer support through inclusion and belonging?

Re-Saturated considers how landscape architecture can promote a restorative relationship with water in the urban environment. The City of Vancouver has defined increased water connectivity as a major objective, with specific targets and strategies outlined in the Rain City Strategy. This project builds on these ideas by asking how design can enrich public experiences of water in educational and evocative ways. The objective is to simultaneously improve the ecological function of the Still Creek watershed while actively engaging local communities in the process, to incite a shift inattitude towards water.

Through two speculative design scenarios, the project explores how a blue corridor could integrate water through Norquay Village while providing amenity space to a changing neighbourhood. A hybrid system of blue-green infrastructure and partial stream daylighting metaphorically reveal Still Creek, with rain water being collected and infiltrated to metabolize the corridor in a variety of ways.

Pleasurably Painful is a conceptual exploration on the usage of biological horror as a lens to view and design industrial ruin sites. Suspended between stages of decline and redevelopment, these sites are largely regarded as worthless areas and are quick to be designed into parks or housing. However, this effaces the potential for new aesthetic experiences in industrial ruins, which can deepen our understanding of the complex urban landscape.

The aesthetic of the post-industrial site is associated with the sublime, a landscape character which overwhelms the mind in a way that has been described as “pleasurably painful.” This project argues that horror fiction, an experience that is similarly pleasurably painful provides a way to both interpret and design industrial ruins. Furthermore, the subgenre of biological horror, which evokes the violation of natural laws, encapsulates the intricate interweaving of natural and cultural processes inherent to post-industrial sites.

The experience of the industrial ruin landscape is simultaneously pleasure and pain, a contradictory hybrid of emotions that can be understood and appreciated through the lens of biological horror.

As a space that demonstrates the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature, architecturally redefining the zoo has the potential to redefine problematic relationships that we hold with nature. By creating “zoos” in the city through multispecies architecture, spaces for coexistence, curiosity, and culture are created for humans and nonhumans alike, challenging what it means to be human or nature in the Anthropocene. The City as Zoo reveals the hidden relationships that already exist between human and nonhuman nature within the urban environment, and seeks to make them not only visible, but accepted. The City as Zoo places the human and nonhuman on equal terms, and celebrates the everyday interactions, phenomena, and beings that exist in the urban realm. Through architecture, the City as Zoo synthesizes the urban and the wild, culture and nature, human and nonhuman, creating spaces where city dwellers can realise their place within a dynamic ecosystem.

Modern methods of food production have accelerated climate change, but can sustainable practices aid in reversing it? The Architecture of Aquaculture seeks to explore the regenerative effects of seaweed aquaculture through an adaptive reuse of controversial salmon farms. British Columbia’s Discovery Islands form the backdrop of this project, as recent legislation has prompted the closure of eighteen open-net salmon farms. Under the guidelines of the Living Building Challenge, a new building typology is proposed that articulates the relationship between humans and nature, while seaweed aquaculture serves as the mediating force.

In urban centres we rely on our built environment to support infrastructure like storm water management, transportation, energy distribution and waste removal to facilitate day-to-day life. Although the development of this infrastructure is necessary to allow urban centres to function, these built interventions create fragmented gaps in our urban landscape and it results in a ruptured relationship between urbanism and nature. In Toronto, we can specifically uncover this disconnection in exploring the Garrison Creek and its current hidden ravine landscape.

Public space plays a fundamental role in creating the high quality of life enjoyed in cities. However as cities grow, so too do our demands of this limited shared resource. Ideas of what is permissible in public space is a highly contentious topic, with fringe activities typically pushed out in favour of less obtrusive uses. Skateboarding is a prime example of an activity that has a wide range of benefits for a city but continues to be actively excluded in the design of public space through the use of defensive architectures. As designers of the public realm, landscape architects have an obligation to design more inclusive public space and approach tensions of cohabitation as an opportunity rather than a threat. This project redefines the city of Vancouver as a skate-city and integrates skate-friendly public space design into multiple locations across the downtown core. In doing so, this project hopes to expand conventional notions of acceptable use in pursuit of a more inclusive design ethic.

This thesis explores architectural ambiguity in the home. This ambiguity produces nonprescriptive environments, which create opportunities for a wide range of activities, experiences, and lifestyles.

Noise often brings to mind a loud or annoying disturbance. When defined as ‘unwanted sound’, we find that noise is not inherently negative, but speaks to a negative reaction to something in one’s environment. How can active listening to our environment inform the way we relate to space and each other in the Anthropocene?

This project will take listeners on a virtual, guided soundwalk through spaces along Vancouver’s waterfront (in the past, present, and future) to amplify how noise continuously shapes our world.

*Bring headphones*

With the intense urbanization of African metropolises already in motion, this thesis revisits residual colonial architecture as sites of potential transformation enabling improvisational and resilience-building socialities and networks. The library as an architectural public anchor sits at a nexus of political, socio-economic, and cultural discussions and agendas. It is also a space that traditionally houses works of writing and languages, expression of identity and memory and, inversely, the control and amnesia of both. Situated in Nairobi’s Central Business District, this research examines architecture of power as relating to language, identity, and memory, connecting the library into a broader framework of new core-periphery relationships.

Scattered throughout the Strait of Georgia, which separates Vancouver Island from mainland British Columbia, are the province’s Gulf Islands. These are sites of extreme endemism and cultural diversity. One such place, at the northern end of this fragmented chain, is Hornby Island. A longstanding arts hub initially characterized by the creative energies of draft dodgers, counter culturalists and hippie intelligentsia who flocked to the island in the 70’s. Part rebellion, part escapist reformation, Hornby Island’s arts culture stands apart from others in the Gulf Islands in that it encompasses both the traditional fine arts and numerous unorthodox architectural explorations. Yet, today the island’s popularity as a tourist destination and ever increasing ease of accessrisks overtaking the memory and methods of the people who helped develop it. As established artisans age and pass on; and property values continue to rise, limiting entry for their successors, a void begins to grow that risks the erosion of localized cultural and craft memory in its vital role as a touchstone of this rural community.

The demand for efficiency and profit within capitalism has rendered architecture to operate as a tool explicit in investment and consumption; causing the loss of individuality and meaningful interaction with space and each other.

As we face an accelerating cost of living due to demands on space, search for profit, and lack of time, architecture is reduced to a tool of investment and capital used by corporations and the very wealthy. By taking the current resulting architectural and social disparities to a logical extreme, such as the drive for efficiency and profit, the reduction of identity, and our lulled complacency through convenience and pleasure, as expressed through the most complex setting of the body and the building, the metropolis, we can learn from the potential dystopian outcome.

What do we notice and pay attention to? What do we take for granted? I believe that the act of slowing down and noticing is a powerful one. Landscape architecture and design more generally are focused on the visual and the production of images. What gets lost is the importance of feelings and experiences. This project explores how we can design landscapes that promote embodied multisensory engagements with the world around us. Mindfulness is an invitation to be present in the here and now, and to connect with our bodies. Designing for the senses is one way of encouraging people to connect with their bodies and environments differently. Thinking about how our bodies meet and perceive the world is also a reminder that we are rarely still. How we move through and to spaces is an essential part of our experience of them. Designing for walking and cycling is one way of inviting people to slow down and to engage with their surroundings.

The Gastown Heritage Guidelines govern all architectural design within the historic area of downtown Vancouver. As these guidelines strictly guard the facade, occupants are forced to expand on the margins. The strict adherence to the guidelines on the face and the simultaneous revolt against them in the form of additions and alterations demonstrates that, to the city of Vancouver, heritage exists independently of evolving cultural ideologies, social issues and economic constraints. This begs the question: What is being preserved, and for whom?

The original Gastown buildings were built to serve a specific need at a specific time and are reflective of the design and construction methods of that time. No longer subject to the same constraints, we can look to contemporary tools such as digital fabrication as a means to generate a much needed disruption.

This thesis seeks to develop an alternative process for incorporating built historical context into contemporary design. By leveraging the inherent logic of digital fabrication machines this project will explore digital interpretations of the Gastown Heritage Design Guidelines.

This project explores the convergence between slow ideology, architecture and construction, and the convention of a city park and how the conventions of slowness impact its function and perception. Set in Victoria, the proposed park will take decades, if not a century to grow and cultivate. As such this project is not so much about the final version of the proposed park but the slow evolutionary process it takes to get there. Micro and macro changes that transform it throughout its lifetime.

Stanley Park is a product of two major landscape and art movements: pastoral and wilderness park styles are tied to picturesque landscape painting and 20th century Canadian wilderness painting. These traditions embody colonial ideas and a narrow view of the landscape that is becoming increasingly untenable as we push towards social and environmental justice. While our conception of parks is stuck in the past, contemporary artists are using landscape painting to respond to today’s issues. Returning to painting as a source material for landscape architecture offers ways to critique existing landscapes and generate new designs. An exploration of process, this thesis reimagines Stanley Park through the lenses of contemporary artists, suggesting alternative ways of experiencing the landscape and examining subjectivity, translation, and expression and perception.

On the morning of August 4, 2014, Hazeltine Creek and about 10 kilometers of British Columbia’s Cariboo Forest were in for an abrupt and violent end to their ancient lives when the tailings dam at the Mount Polley Mine upstream breached and released the vast majority of its stored contaminated waste: 25 million cubic meters, the equivalent of nearly 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The outpour wiped out thousands of trees, eroded the forest floor exposing the hidden bedrock beneath, and contaminated the once pristine Quesnel and Polley Lake water systems.

The Mount Polley Mine Disaster is considered to be Canada’s worst environmental disaster and is the second largest recorded tailings spill in mining history.

A landscape architect can be many things, as our growing profession continues to profess. We are ecologists and artists; leaders and activists; earth-shapers and earth-preservers.

This project explores the role of the landscape architect as storyteller in troubled landscapes, using the Mount Polley Mine 2014 Disaster as a site and incident of investigation.

Queer Prairie Futures is an exploration in the intersection of rural landscapes and queer space theory using Alberta’s Aspen Parkland ecoregion as a testing ground. The aspen parkland was once a fluid, transitional ecoregion of forests, grasslands, and wetlands. This fluidity was carefully managed in collaboration with all beings in the space. The landscape has since been altered by a heteronormative settler system that prioritizes and reproduces controlled landscapes of sameness. Through decades of resource extraction and monoculture farming, all deviance has been overwritten, and it has become one of the most static, human-altered ecosystems in North America.This project identifies three sites that demonstrate this heteronormative control, and speculates new landscapes that hypothesize queer methods of relating to the land and other beings. A fair amount of writing and research has been done on analysis and production of queer space, especially in the disciplines of building architecture and urban planning, but how does this analysis and theory apply to designing landscapes in rural spaces?

As public washrooms are insufficient in its reach, this project shifts to a centralized washroom typology in which an underutilized, city-owned, parking structure is transformed as a dense node for washrooms for health and socialization that adds stacked programmatic functions to foster community. Currently, existing public washrooms are stretched thin over a wide geography across Vancouver. Many of these single entities are situated inside parks and are not owned by the city. In addition to higher maintenance costs and inefficiency, the utilitarian nature of these public washrooms does not do much to contribute to its surrounding communities. By providing washrooms in a centralized model where there are more people, new forms of community can be created from the basic unit of a washroom to layer programs together. Centralization of public washrooms can create access and foster community to allow people to stay longer and go farther.

As the Skytrain system continues to grow, the development of stations seems poised to continue an approach of singular functionality with little consideration of integration to site. Many recently built stations offer little value to surrounding communities as they function to primarily fulfill the paradigm of transit oriented development with several factors constraining their design. This qualitative minimization undermines public perceptions of mass transit and inhibits the benefits the system brings to the city. As the Skytrain system grows this approach will only continue to define much of Metro Vancouver’s urbanism for decades to come.

As you’re sitting on the beach, with your feet in the sand you may look down and begin to wonder how the sand in your toes arrived there... This project seeks to reveal the agency and multiplicities of sand in our everyday rituals and environments.

The explosion of the senior population is a significant demographic change unprecedented in human history. This demographic change is along with urbanization development in developed countries and fast-growing developing countries. In Canada, the population of seniors is higher than 14-64 years old people who can work. We are in an aging society. The project focuses on studying an aging society with accessible landscapes and streetscape to create a sustainable aging community for all sources of people. The renovated design project allows seniors to socialize with others. The social core atmosphere is branding out to streets and neighbourhoods. People should not be afraid to be old, because your life will become great.

Who cares?
Who cleans?
Who did all the dirty works for us?
Where are they, and how do they live?

The thesis explores the hidden story and spaces in architecture to help recognize the social and political issues faced by precarious workers.

We live in a world where we are encouraged to produce, consume and waste continually. Every aspect of life utilizes consumer products in which the generation of waste is inevitable. The repeated cycle of consumerism is the basis for a sound economy and a stable society. However, the unvalued by-product of consumerism has raised social and environmental problems that negatively impact our lives. Waste is defined as matter out of place concerned with the management of disappearance. Waste management has been practiced along with the development of civilization.Throughout history to even today, landfilling the unwanted objects has remained as the primary action. After the final closure of the landfill, the transformation of a large scale dumpsite to a natural park hides our secret. This project intends to unmask this beautiful lie by relinking the connection between the park space on the ground to the waste buried underneath. The waste materiality, garbage decomposition, leachate pollution, and landfill settlement are revealed through four architectural interventions.

By refocusing on the role of the archive as the bridge between the material and the immaterial, a new synthesis within the architectural discourse takes shape that rethinks the ancient practice of documenting.

With the emergence of AI and other technological advances, archives are metamorphosing to autonomous curations and a new voice is heard that narrates the immaterial qualities of humanity in a different light.

#KEYA

The Covid-19 pandemic revealed and exacerbated spatial injustices among different socioeconomic groups in cities. Among many other issues, it raised the questions: What is the role of public space in mitigating the spatial injustices in the city? How can landscape design embrace social care in the design of public space? This project addresses these questions in a Canadian neighbourhood that is home to large numbers of homeless and underhoused people.

Close your eyes. Wait…never mind. Keep your eyes open. Recall a time you were in a public space - a street, park,plaza, etc. Are you seeing this memory through your own eyes or are you looking at yourself? How do you feel? What details do you remember? Is this a good memory? Has that experience had a lasting effect on you?

These are the stories of women as they try to answer these questions in my quest to explore perception and embodiment of space through film.

wah · yang (from the Malay language), n.
1. Movie 2. Shadow 3. Imagination