Architecture

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/9902

This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's School of Architecture.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

Waterloo faculty, students, and staff can contact us or visit the UWSpace guide to learn more about depositing their research.

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Beyond The Unit: A Typology Of Rooms for Adaptive Living and Contemporary Kinship
(University of Waterloo, 2024-10-17) Tang, Bill CM; Bissett, Tara
This thesis reimagines housing in response to the limitations of the dwelling unit. In its various forms both as a detached suburban houses and stacked into apartment blocks and condos, the architecture of the unitized family dwelling is a typology of units that embodies the specific social values of the nuclear family it is designed to accommodate and is often hostile to other family types and living arrangements. Its enshrinement in policy and cultural assumption as the default way to build and organize our communities, has contributed to increasing social isolation, unaffordability, and inefficient use of resources. Breaking down the patterns of unit dwelling and drawing from existing alternatives like co-living, housing co-operatives, and cohousing, this thesis proposes a new and adaptable housing typology based on the aggregation of rooms. This typology of rooms replaces predefined and static units with a dynamic system of rooms with porous and mobile boundaries, which residents can assemble into dwellings and continuously reconfigure according to their changing spatial needs. The goal is to empower residents with tools to create dwellings that can accommodate their diverse living arrangements within a socially responsive building. The thesis further examines how this typology can be realized through various adaptability strategies responding to its unique parameters and goals, including changes to the design process, governance, operation, and ownership models of buildings. To demonstrate the principles of the typology, four prototypes are designed at different scales, each employing a unique set of strategies to illustrate the breath of contexts possible for the typology in practice.
From For To With: Towards an Allographic Approach in Architecture
(University of Waterloo, 2025-02-13) Fournier, Marc-; Bissett, Tara
Although transformations to buildings are inevitable, architecture often aims to achieve idealized, finalized artifacts that refute the passage of time. This professional bias towards temporality – or the problem of permanence – creates and perpetuates non-reciprocal relationships between architects, users, and the built environment that often results in the exploitation and alienation of the people the discipline attempts to serve. By examining architecture's failure to account for diverse temporalities, this research sheds light on the ways in which architects overlook their potential to cultivate meaningful social interactions with the built environment. The architect’s role, therefore, needs to be redefined as a translator of collective desires and needs, as a designer of structures that promote agency and empower individuals to engage with their environments. This paradigm shift implies an inquiry into the architect’s conventional design apparatus and the expansion of its scope to include tools that embrace temporality and contingency as key variables. The thesis proposes a shift in focus from the production of artifacts to the design of architectural scores inspired by allographic arts. Allographic thinking shifts the emphasis from end product to process; forcing a renegotiation of author-designer / performer-user relationships, focusing on affordances and obstacles, favoring user agency, and embracing contingency. The context of the Habitations Jeanne-Mance, a post-war social housing in Montréal, acts as a case study for an exploration of the disciplinary problems of permanence, alienation, and non-reciprocity, as well as the testing ground for a speculative design intervention that integrates allographic thinking into architecture to create a system that promotes user participation, indeterminacy, and reciprocal relationships between residents and their built environment.
How Do We Belong Here? The Evolution and Expression of Incidental Spaces of Belonging for Toronto's Chinese Diaspora
(University of Waterloo, 2024-05-13) Chi, Aurora Xiaozhu; Bissett, Tara
The Chinese diaspora of immigrant cities have historically created spaces of enclosed cultural spheres for collective survival and adaptation and this thesis examines those of Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area. Such spaces are often called “ethnic enclaves”, characterized by their homogenized demographic and corresponding services, spaces, and activities specific to those backgrounds. The subject of this thesis is an exploration of incidental spaces of belonging in these enclaves that were not explicitly built or programmed for building a sense of belonging but exist as such nonetheless because of what they contain. In a method of analysis analogous to the approaches taken by Interboro in The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion and by Huda Tayob in her work in critical drawing, I examine the role of spaces, such as Chinese malls and plazas, private establishments, and streets of Chinatowns, and uncover how scales of belonging are developed through architecture, spatial planning, sign and language, and networks. As transmigration and transnational economies proliferate due to globalization, the character of these cultural spaces of belonging have shifted since the first diaspora in the nineteenth century – strengthening the sense of belonging in some ways and eroding it in others. This has led to the rise of impermeable spaces, which import Chinese culture, alongside permeable spaces that export culture. As Sara Ahmed has argued, “it is the uncommon estrangement of migration itself that allows migrant subjects to remake what it is they might yet have in common”. This thesis explores these incidental spaces of belonging for Toronto’s Chinese diaspora and examines how physical, social, and temporal factors affect their permeability through field research, critical drawing, photography, and written analysis.
It's Not a Room, It's The Home I'll Never Have
(University of Waterloo, 2024-12-11) Kaczmarczyk, Magdalena; Bissett, Tara
Humanity and architecture have been in a long dialogue with Utopia. Since Thomas More’s publication in the 1500s, the term of “Utopia” has been adopted by architects, artists, and intellectuals alike, using it as either a point of contentious discussion, or as something to strive for. Within architecture, the application of utopia has been vast, from Boullée and Ledoux to the speculative architectures of Cedric Price and Superstudio in the 60s–70s. These utopias, despite the variances of design outcomes, all share a common denominator: the intent to design the ideal. Using the architectural utopia as a framework, It’s Not a Room, It’s The Home I’ll Never Have is a theoretical research and speculative design thesis that investigates the condition of Canada’s housing crisis, entitled The City of Rooms. In the thesis, the role of critical utopias within architecture is explored through generative artificial intelligence (genAI) as a proxy for neoliberalist design and decision making. The work questions the self-iterative neoliberal trends, and envisions an optimizational utopia in which minimum dwelling units are the ideal response to the question of the housing crisis through a set of speculative images located in Toronto. If the goal of the critical utopia is to examine how we live, then the current housing crisis that many major Canadian cities are facing can serve as an urgent case for such analysis; the alienating real-estate development, privatization, and profit optimization has continuously resulted in smaller and smaller living space and exacerbates the existing housing crisis. This problem stems from a set of neoliberalist policy changes in the 80s, where the Canadian government loosened tenancy protections, eliminated funding for affordable housing, and deregulated the financial sector. Lacking specific regulation to prevent this, the problem has evolved into a self-iterative system that propagates to this day. Ultimately, the key impact of this research is to reveal and critically analyze the neoliberal techniques employed in the housing market in Toronto, while showcasing the beneficial use-case of speculative design when bringing the ideology to its logical, utopian conclusion.
Tatreez as Archive: Spatializing the Palestinian Diaspora
(University of Waterloo, 2024-10-16) Alqasas, Batool; Bissett, Tara
Despite the extensive research produced on the topic of Palestinian homes and mobility within the Occupied Territories, the experiences of Palestinians living in the Diaspora are greatly underrepresented. More specifically, accurate information in the form of published data on Palestinian immigrants in Canada is unavailable due to their stateless status and global dispersion. As a result, research to record diasporic knowledge of home for Palestinians living in exile is crucial to understand how local contexts and practices reflect embedded memories and past experiences. This thesis will analyze how architecture and design work to enhance and augment existing Palestinian-led efforts in both a social and spatial sense. It explores the theme of collective memory and the spatial-temporal aspects of diasporic living by mapping the emergence of ‘tatreez-making’ spaces (Palestinian embroidery) in the Greater Toronto Area. The design proposal offers a collaborative approach that re-imagines the existing Palestine House in the city of Mississauga which acts as a living archive and an event space that celebrates tatreez and empowers its users. Tatreez is a visual language that has been linked to the shifting social, economic, and political landscape. Historically, the landscape was a major source of inspiration for Palestinian women in designing the motifs. As such, each village carried its own expressions, patterns, and thread colours. Following the displacement, tatreez evolved from being a symbol of regional pride to a symbol of Palestinian nationalism, especially for the diaspora community. Through tatreez as a guiding medium, the thesis proposes new ways of seeing, understanding, and constructing our visual and material environment in relation to textiles, design, and architecture. By analyzing existing Palestinian initiatives, my research aims to address the following question: How might re-imagined architecture facilitate the preservation of Palestinian culture, identity, and knowledge while maintaining connections to local contexts? The objective of the thesis is to push architects to consider diasporic populations in design research in order to record historical data on migration and employ diasporic knowledge within architectural discourse.
Wahdat al Wujud: the Moroccan madrasa, Zellige tiles, and Sufi ontology
(University of Waterloo, 2024-08-28) Salama, Ali; Bissett, Tara
Wahdat al wujud—loosely translated as unity of being—is a Sufi philosophical concept that refers to the oneness or collectivity of our entire consciousness. This thesis aims to reframe our understanding of space through an exploration of wahdat al wujud. Today, our modern societies and spaces overwhelmingly neglect our unity of being. Capitalism clouds our hearts so that empathy and care become commodities we don’t want to spend, and the increasingly fast pace of daily life leaves little room for reflection on the great loss of our collectivity. We grow more alienated and become increasingly distant from one another and the world at large. Our spaces only further this alienation, neglecting their vital role as the realizers of our interconnected being. Architecture is a cosmological act. Samer Akkach talks about how cosmology and architecture were intimately tied in the premodern Islamic tradition. Spaces reflected our understanding of the universe and fostered our place within it. The link between cosmology and architecture has been lost to our modern conceptions of the practice. The Moroccan madrasa and Zellige tiles serve as reminders and key case studies of this link, connecting architecture with the cosmological view of wahdat al wujud. The Moroccan madrasa is a space of teaching and learning based around a central courtyard where students congregate. The courtyard is adorned by intricate enamelled terracotta tiles, known as Zellige. The spatial configuration of the madrasa symbolically reflects the philosophy of wahdat al wujud at the cosmic scale; connecting God, human and world. At the same time, its phenomenological qualities nurture a profound experience of awe and belonging as a part of this wahdat al wujud. In the madrasa, our entire perception of existence is redefined: being becomes a collective experience and not an individual one; we perceive ourselves as part of a communal oneness, akin to the Sufi analogy of being drops in the ocean. To break the cycle of alienating architecture, we need to rediscover the link between cosmology and architecture. If our architecture fosters a vision of communal being, our built environment can instead perpetuate a cycle of collective belonging. Architecture is not just a backdrop for human activity but the essential conduit that shapes and defines our entire existence. It can reconnect us to our fundamental unity, fostering our empathy and care for one another and the world at large.

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Browsing Architecture by Author "Bissett, Tara"