3G3 - ARCH 422 - WINTER 2025
SITUATION
GRADUATE STUDIO
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN3G3 - ARCH 422 - WINTER 2025COORDINATOR
Meredith MillerPROFESSORS
Angela Cho, Meredith MillerMaterial Culture Visitor's Center
As the third and final design studio in the first-year M.Arch studio sequence, this course expands on the design approaches and representation skills introduced in FOUNDATIONS and FORM studios by prompting students to SITUATE their work within cultural contexts, material systems, and physical sites.
Three design projects explore materials, assemblies, and tectonics. From part-to-whole logics of assembly to cultural histories of industrialized building materials (particularly in our Great Lakes region), students make connections between the physical and social impacts of architecture and its nested situations.
For the final project (on view here), students designed a Material Culture Visitor's Center on a site in Toronto's waterfront area where a large urban development is literally reshaping the ground. The area's industrial past is being replaced by commercial and cultural uses, including a park and bike path that connects through the studio's site. Building on individual life cycle research and hands-on experiments on a particular material, each student developed a distinct material and programmatic proposal for the Visitor's Center. Projects had to coordinate ideas about tectonics (an approach to assembly) and steretomics (an approach to the ground).
STUDENT
Charlotte Lee
PROFESSOR
Angela Cho
Located in Toronto’s Portlands, a post-industrial area undergoing development, the project uses manually crimped and bent steel tubes repurposed at the end of their life cycle. It explores how rigid steel could appear soft and pliable, and how industrial sounds – clinks or impacts – might be recontextualized. Drawing from agricultural structures like barns, I designed a kit-of-parts for flexible pavilions assembled by community members to house performances. Crimped steel sheets modulate sound and visibility into workshops and studio space from public gathering space. The project reflects on how sound, collaborative labor, and material reuse inform civic relationships to the industrial landscape.
STUDENT
Shaguun Patel
PROFESSOR
Angela Cho
The initial investigation explored terrazzo as a method of recycling used objects through irregular casting, challenging its conventional smooth and standardized production.
This strategy extended to Toronto’s Port Lands, a landscape shaped by contaminated soil, extraction, and redevelopment. I proposed an underground mushroom farm, using the excavation as an opportunity to define both form and program. Debris and displaced soil from the site become aggregate for terrazzo walls, floors, and roof. The mushrooms gradually remediate the soil, while the land above is restored as public park space. The project links material reuse, environmental repair, and architectural form into a single regenerative system.
STUDENT
Krzysztof Lower
PROFESSOR
Meredith Miller
"Stock Pile" is a proposal for a visitors center in Toronto, ON. The project reuses CLT slabs from old buildings—cutting the material to a modular size, then stacking on steel tubes—to design an end-of-life scenario for mass timber structures. The linear arrangement of CLT slabs is backfilled with rubble from the demolition of the built environment found around the coastline, putting to use what is considered waste. Visitors enter the building from the street corner, descending down the rubble ramp into the Stock Pile, ending at the riverfront. The composition of reused material intends to represent a dramatic scar in the landscape, recalling the past and projecting a new future.