2022-2023
AURAL ARCHITECTURE: CISTERN OF LIGHT
1st Place - Bernadette Galingan & Jia Yi Zhu
Shadows evoke a sense of quiet, uncertainty and mystery.
The quiet hum in the background of the piece and the soft and slow music creates a feeling of cold darkness. It is paired with the echo of water drops and metal clinking, creating feelings of hollowness and anxiousness. This emotion of uncertainty is then met with hope and awe midway, as the piano plays a more uplifting and dramatic melody. At that moment the imagery of seeing light came to mind. Light is the crude contrast of shadow. Light is often associated with hope, sight and clarity.
The music creates that feeling of clarity, emerging from the earlier mystery and cold uncertainty. The piece guided the intention of light and shadow as a means to express the duality of the emotions and dynamics of the piece within a space. The uncertainty and hollowness is depicted by a quiet darkness while the hopeful, uplifting feelings of clarity is depicted by the light.
EDRA Conference 53 2022 Greenville:
Evaluating Daylight in Nursing Homes, An Analysis of Three Small House Case Studies
Terri Peters PhD, Jana Stojanovska
Abstract:
Exposure to daylight in residential environments has been proven to support healthy sleep patterns, reduce stress, and improve physical and psychological wellbeing (Veitch and Galasiu 2012). In typical nursing homes, resident rooms are arranged along a double loaded corridor, and social spaces and amenities are centralized, requiring residents to socialize and eat together in larger groups. COVID-19 increased people’s awareness of the challenges of healthy nursing home design and the need for incorporating biophilic design and natural lighting (Peters and Verderber 2021). Numerous studies have shown that daylight is an important part of therapeutic environments for the elderly (Day et al., 2000). This research project examined floorplan layouts of designs that follow ‘small house’ design principles, a generic name for elder care environments that focus on creating non-institutional and ‘home like’ designs, where residents live in 8-12 room clusters, have decentralized living and dining areas and other specific staff and facility requirements. A number of small house projects were considered and typology-specific daylight challenges were identified in these environments. This study then evaluated three case studies in more depth, and these floor plans were modelled and simulated for daylight autonomy (to identify spaces with adequate light levels), annual solar exposure (to assess glare and over lit conditions), and useful daylight illuminance (considering more variety in light levels) using environmental simulation software. The case studies represent different small house designs: a double loaded corridor design in Vancouver, British Columbia, with ten individual residential rooms and shared living spaces on the southeast side; 2) an L-shaped facility consisting of both single and double loaded corridors in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with six individual residential rooms and central living spaces, and; 3) a clustered floorplan arrangement in St. Catherines, Ontario, with eight individual residential rooms and central living spaces. The private rooms, social spaces, and staff spaces of each case study was compared, to understand which interior layouts allows for the best daylight conditions. As expected, the L-shaped facility in Saskatoon had the best results, whereas the double-loaded corridor in Vancouver had the worst overall performance. All three projects had resident rooms that had enough daylight based on annual daylight autonomy simulations, but all experienced high levels of glare and over lighting, which is known to cause discomfort. In all cases, the shared resident social spaces and all staff spaces did not receive sufficient daylight autonomy. The design of social spaces should be reconsidered to promote the comfort and wellbeing of the residents by improving daylighting in these areas. The lack of daylight in staff spaces also highlights another concern of nursing homes which is staff burnout and poor staff satisfaction. The results of this preliminary study will be extended with on site measurements in a more comprehensive analysis of non-renovated and newly renovated nursing homes. A main conclusion of this study is that the use of environmental simulation to evaluate how daylight is experienced in the different spaces can be a powerful tool for predicting future designs and identifying areas for future renovation.
DAS Front Entry Project
William Galloway, Treya Vyas, Raymin Sidhar. Jack Dalgleish-Morel. Gabriel Garofalo, Sung min Yoon, Yiran Ma, Naomi Soufi Sabbagh, Jeffrey Zee, Leshin Chew, Samantha Wu, Daniel Fiala, Hira Fayyaz, Nathan Wen, Angela Le
The project is a small design installation at the front of the department building entrance. Utilizing the pre-existing lamp posts, the structure rests on the posts to create a cascading sort of form that feels light and elevated (kind of like a cloud). It uses 3D Sinter printed connections and 3D robot printed blocks with plywood connections to stand. In addition to benefitting individual portfolios and application documents, the project utilizes digital design and fabrication tools. In regards to the first, second and third year students, the project provides the ability to learn to design and use those tools (CNC Routing, Laser cutting, 3D Printing and model making) as well as help in project fabrication. This project took a unique turn introducing experimental solutions further teaching important skills such as acrylic bending, CNCing PVC board to heat and fold to create the blocks and sinter printed clips with zip-tie attachments.
EDULEArn 22: REINFORCING EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING: MAINTAINING AND SUSTAINING ARCHITECTURAL PEDAGOGY PRE- AND POST-COVID
Vincent Hui, Ariel Weiss, Alexandra Winslow, Evan Fernandes, Justin Lieberman
The resilience of institutions, their faculty, and students during the two years of multiple waves of the COVID pandemic is not necessarily reflected in the continuity of curriculum and programming, but the various ways in which they thrived. Whereas many fields of student were able to pivot to online paradigms with relative ease, certain programs and courses mandating in-person activities ranging from acting in front of an audience in performance to collaborating with peers in a lab, faced a dramatic reorganization and paradigm shift in their curriculum. Online delivery threatened to especially compromise architectural pedagogy. Steeped in a curriculum of a) in-person design critiques, b) collegial engagement in shared studio environments, c) access to physical resources and facilities, d) an abundance of extracurricular activity to apply developed design skills, and e) outreach opportunities to the local community, architectural pedagogy is unique; in-person activity is tacit to the discipline.
Whereas other institutions and programs adhered to a minimal threshold for continuity of education, many innovative institutions developed alternative solutions to overcome this digital divide. This paper presents the various ways Canada’s largest accredited architectural program was able to address all five of the aforementioned components to an architectural curriculum while all online. Rather than harboring resentment and fatigue for the ubiquitous online tools for course delivery, other solutions were developed to integrate online tools in these various curricular facets of architectural education. From digital whiteboards and individualized digital feedback to use of mixed reality tools and Minecraft outreach programming, this paper articulates the importance, relative ease, and accessibility of these digital tools into architectural education that proved successful during the COVID pandemic