Fall 2022
Archipelago 3.5: Storytelling, Activism, Re-Building
Osei Wireko
Fragile Fringes
Accra, Ghana
T
Marcelline Siu
Landscapes of Disturbance
Lytton, BC, Canada
Disturbances are not isolated destructive events but instead mark the transformation from one state to another. This thesis will investigate the Lytton, BC wildfire as a site of perpetual disturbance and explore a form of architecture that engages with the social, historical and environmental factors that both precede and follow disturbances.
Katrina Santos
The In-between
Illigan, Phillipines
This project looks at the City of Iligan, examining the rich dynamism and chaos that exists within its cultural and historical fabric. Through ethnographic and spatial analyses, Iligan can be understood and unravelled as the city of ritual and appearance expressed through the street as a stage for performance.
Focusing on “Public” versus “public”- sub-alternate public spaces, this project challenges the distinction between the two as spaces of appearance and exchange; one being formal, organized, given more priority and importance; while the latter is perceived inferior, informal, chaotic. Likewise, emphasis is put on the street and its associate culture as vital, critical, dynamic nodes of linkages, from major public realms, settlements, pathways, to minor public spaces. The day-to-day, seemingly mundane activities on the streets are points of performance and exchanges; juxtaposed by the major events that takes place in celebration of the city’s feast are critical points of analyses linking spaces of settlements with the public realm.
Farah Aldaghestani
An Atlas of Haida Gwaii: Striving for Sustenance and Resilience
Haida Gwaii, BC, Canada
A history of unsettlement and uprooting into new land tenures and new colonial settlements was lived by the Haida people. The Haida Land has seen an increase in illegal hunting, fishing and logging as a result of unsustainable extraction practices that have caused resource depletion.
This thesis acknowledges the Haida Nation, ‘People of Haida’ to whom the lands they live upon have been their ancestral homes since time immemorial, and their steadfast efforts to protect and sustain the archipelago’s premises. This thesis intends to honor the long history and presence of the Haida Nation as well as to commemorate their knowledge and reflect on their methods of responding to crises. As part of the reconciliation process, this thesis criticizes the strains that Indigenous people in Haida Gwaii have endured as a result of colonialism and its impacts, which are still being felt today.
Tianyu Zhang
The Beijing Drifters
Tiantongyuan community, Banjieta urban village, Beijing, China
“Economic, social and political values are juxtaposed with the psychological and physiological attributes of the human being, raising problems of the relations between the individual and the community. Life can only expand to the extent that accord is reached between these two opposing 2 forces: the individual and the community.”
- The Athens Charter
Since the Chinese economic reform, the aggressive expansion of urbanization was the major theme of Chinese urban planning strategy. The rapid but unbalanced development in the economy, policy, urbanism, and society, led the capital city, Beijing, to become a symbol of life quality attracting people from second and third-tier cities chasing their dreams. These people, officially identified as Beijing Drifters, contributed to the massive growth in economic and social development. They became the indispensable urbanization force to speed up Beijing as a global super-city. However, the unique Chinese household registration system (Hukou), separates the Beijing drifters from other citizens and limits their social rights. The absence of official statistics regarding their existence allows the Beijing Drifters to be identified as an important new kind of citizen: an invisible demographic that can only be documented via city utility and mobile usage data.
Clement Sung
Distortion Island
Jeju-do, South Korea
Distortions critiques the growing tourism industry in Jeju-do, South Korea, through its unique definition and phenomenon of a museum. A Jeju museum merely requires the display of 100 objects, and Distortions aims to stretch this definition to examine the experience and consumption of landscapes.
Ramisa Eva
Immersed City, Shifting Ground
Bagerhat, Khulna, Bangladesh
Sea level rise in the Bay of Bengal poses a serious threat, particularly in the coastal region of the southern part of Bangladesh. The cause of the sea level rise is the rise in temperature, due to which there is salinity and merges into river systems disrupting the ecological balance. Flooding is a key physical element of this area because of the low altitudes and the abundance of rivers.
Brick and water have shaped the character of Bagerhat's landscape but also present challenges for preservation. The salinity seeps into the brickwork of Bagerhat’s mosques which are located one meter above sea level through a process known as efflorescence. This site is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, a city from the early 15th century formerly known as "Khalifatabad." One of the world's top 25 culturally significant yet endangered heritage site. Climate change is exacerbating the influx of saline water to the region, increasing the problem of efflorescence, and putting these mosques at even greater risk. Will the ground take back everything to who it belongs? Will we be able to save it? What alternate route could be improvised to detain it from disappearing or immersing?
These mosques are more than monuments or spiritual services. It is crucial to have these lenses, a bigger map of understanding the transportation, network, water, infrastructure, sanctuary and shelter. These come together with these infrastructures. The pattern of these people is to actively fight and adapt and not to give up as this is their homeland- their motherland.
Mia Chen
Cheung Shan Estate: the Story of a “Desolate Island”
Hong Kong
K
Jerry Lin
pesca | tours
Penghu Islands, Taiwan
R
Chuan He
Behind the Grand Canal
Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, China
C
Zanira Ali
Towards prison [reform] abolition
USA
Architecture is fundamental to shaping conditions of civil existence and must be interrogated for its involvement along this diffuse and mobile path. This research aims to expand the ways the built environment’s relationship to, and participation in the carceral state, is understood in architecture. It investigates how the implications of architecture in the more longstanding and pervasive legacies of racialized coercion in North America—and follow the premise that to understand how the prison enacts its violence in the present, we must understand the history of slavery and its connection to modern day incarceration.
© Archipelago Studio 2023 @ the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.