Architecture

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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).

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 23

Awakening Beauty: Meaning in Contemporary Catholic Architecture
(University of Waterloo, 2020-01-16) Quinn, Andrea; Bordeleau, Anne
A Catholic church is unique among other places of worship because the space of a church forms the central place for the sacramental life of the Church, as Body of Christ, while also being an expression of it. With the exception of the Orthodox tradition, this is unique even among other Christian denominations. Catholic sacramental life is the path to holiness for any believer, providing the means by which one journeys from earthly to eternal life. Life as a Catholic means living within this tension between temporality and eternity, so the way architectural design negotiates past, present and future is a key consideration for any church. This thesis investigates several questions: What is a Catholic church, in essence, and how can its form be shaped by cultural and temporal context? How is meaning - manifest as beauty - instilled and communicated through architecture? How can a church be both contemporary, and an icon of eternity? In recent decades, the Catholic Church has struggled to develop a meaningful architectural language within our contemporary world. This failure to utilize architecture’s communicative power in such significant cultural and religious spaces presents problems not only in an evangelistic sense but leads to a ripple effect in the way society values and experiences our built environment, as a whole. In that sense, this topic extends far beyond Catholicism. An examination of Catholic architecture can lead to questions about the role and the value of architecture in the world and how its beauty (or lack thereof ) influences who we are as human beings. Within the context of Catholic sacramental life, the thesis is composed of seven reflections around time, ritual, and culture, exploring the ways meaning can be communicated through architecture, resulting in expressions of beauty.
Building a Parc de la langue française / Retracing my steps as a designer
(University of Waterloo, 2016-09-26) Lasnier, Louis-Charles; van Pelt, Robert Jan; Bordeleau, Anne; McKay, Donald
In 1979, Québec artist Rober Racine wrote a 190-word text that would describe his idea for Le Parc de la langue française, a landscape where one could literally meander through the French language. Although some partial iterations of this project have been presented over the years, the complete Parc has not been built. Yet. This thesis is my take on Rober Racine’s Le Parc de la langue française. In doing so, I found myself observing the design process itself, the making of a design project as well as my making as a designer. This thesis has many questions. Where could you build it so it would be, as Racine envisioned, ‘permanent’? Emblematic Mount-Royal Park was the first answer. Then how to unfold Racine’s 190-word concertina vision into a 2,14 million m2 park? How to intertwine the 60,000 words of Le Petit Robert dictionary into that landscape and create a space to celebrate the French language while providing freedom for slowness, contemplation and absorption? How to create the depth, layers, spaces and media through which the visitor could dialogue with the language, Olmsted’s park, the forest and the city? In building a project, I, as a designer, ask myself a plethora of questions. Layering the questions, one atop the other, is my design process. My proposition for Le Parc de la langue française is therefore multilayered: beacons within the landscape; a map one could keep and follow while in the park; a circular glass pavilion, 75 m in diameter where one could sit and read the full 292 m of a table on which the 60,000 words from Le Petit Robert are printed. This thesis also reflects on what builds a community around a project, how this community becomes involved in it, adopts it, builds it and nurtures it through time. In the hopes of engaging such a community, this thesis has become an exhibition. While writing my thesis, I reflected on how a design project is made and, beyond the project, how a designer is built. Examining the different layers of my persona – graphic designer, architect and now professor at UQAM – I explored the palimpsest that I am through the influences my teachers, mentors, friends and colleagues have had on me. Both cathartic and optimistic, this essay is testimony to what it means to be a designer and what it means to build designers.
Clay Shapes the Hand
(University of Waterloo, 2021-12-16) Dawson, Kelsey Rose; Bordeleau, Anne
Clay is a ubiquitous and malleable substance that records history at the scale of geologic time. Present in creation stories and found to be one of the first human tools, clay runs parallel to humanity. Clay acts as a vessel, carrying information across vast time spans both physically and metaphorically. The physical permanence of ceramic objects and the chronological endurance of craft practice provide a unique window on objects and techniques across centuries, linking the contemporary world to past cultural contexts. But today, the scale of commercial use and mass mining distances clay from its meaningful link to place, time, and the human hand. Through a careful analysis of clay and participation in the craft practice of ceramics, the intention in this thesis is to re-learn how to look closely, read material, de-centre human understanding, listen, and gather clay’s story. Beginning with a review of mythical, historical, theoretical, and scientific literature, I attempt to unravel clay’s interwoven path with the origins of humanity. The work then turns to site analysis and material experiments to gather information and form a picture of one of humanity’s oldest functional materials. Clay is the lens through which I study three sites, one in ancient Rome, the other in Qing dynasty, Jingdezhen, and a third site in Southern Ontario, where I locate, dig, harvest, and process wild clay. By writing the microhistories of these ancient and contemporary clay sites and engaging in the production of two series of ceramic works, the thesis documents learnings about land, ownership, iteration, and consumption. Contemporary craft practice is deeply connected to material questions, bringing up consideration of their extraction, transport, transformation, and significance. How do I interact with the materials I use to make work and make a living? How do I situate myself as a settler, architect, or potter? The journey of an intimate material relationship with clay becomes a means to think critically about materials, their place in the world, and our own.
Digital Craft | In Search of a Method of Personal Expression Within the Digital
(University of Waterloo, 2018-01-23) Brown, Wade; Bordeleau, Anne
Our relationship with the digital has fundamentally changed within the past decade. A mesh of outside interests have been efficiently folding themselves into our lives. These exist as either a legion of hosted “free” web services touting the promise of a new-found collective intimacy, or a set of tightly coupled IOT(Internet of Things) applications that are slowly being pulled away from our fully capable hardware—all causing us to rely heavily on a virtual infrastructure that demands to host our work and place us at arm’s length of tools that we no longer own or control. This new bargain includes a view into our work and habits so that we can be better understood, tokenized, categorized, mapped, and finally monetized. While many today may be OK with this relationship, I’ll be frank, it unsettles me. I believe something fundamental is lost in this unravelling long-distance relationship. This thesis is a response. It pushes for a more intimate connection with technology within the backdrop of digital design and its many processes. In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett writes: “Making is Thinking,” and in his text he explores the close relationship between head and hand for a small set of traditional craftsmen: a cook, a musician and a glass blower. To elevate the digital within today’s architectural practice, I feel its use must also be seen as craft. But how might a relationship between head and hand manifest itself? Is there some similarity in thinking between Sennett’s craftsmen and the processes of successful digital design? I propose to investigate the mechanisms of digital Making, and hence digital Thinking through three design problems, inspired by the works of Neri Oxman, deskriptiv, Michael Hansmeyer, as well as the methods of D’Arcy Thompson, Shinichi Maruyama, Pina Bausch, and Frei Otto. By mindfully observing my exploration of these from a digital perspective, I believe it will be possible to get a sense of what makes craft possible within this realm.
For Every Line Casts A Shadow
(University of Waterloo, 2020-01-08) Allman, Siobhan; Bordeleau, Anne
The blank page represents a void, an open area of space that holds the potential for architecture. Through a process of drawing points, lines and planes, the void of the paper is cut to become an arrangement of curated, smaller areas of architectural space. There is a moment of self reflection and inquiry about how to begin, where to place the first line. What is the specific method for reasoning to break the wall at two meters to create space for a window? If there are two or more buildings, what predicates their position in relation to one another? At the height of Modern Architecture, the graphic environment of geometric abstract paintings participated in a reflexive exchange with the architect. Abstract painting acted as a tool for spatial inquiry for the architect, providing compositional solutions that informed architectural space. A series of compositional studies explore how abstract, geometric compositions provide new avenues for spatial inquiry and can act as an active participant in the development of architectural ideas. As the point becomes the line and then the plane on the page, its final iteration is the translation into the third dimension. Each line contributes to the walls, beams, screens, doors and apertures that compose the experience of light within a building; these lines catch sun and cast a shadow.
From Pedagogy to Agency: Learning to Act in Rural China
(University of Waterloo, 2017-09-14) Zhou, Puzhen; Bordeleau, Anne
From Pedagogy to Agency confronts the imbalances found between rural and urban society in China, exploring the role education plays in their ever-changing relationship. The thesis posits that schools, classrooms, and education can play a vital role as places of mediation within our society. Places where differences are not only tolerated but are made critical components of a shared world. While education is now defined by the answers we receive rather than the questions we ask. This thesis proposes space of learning where we learn to ask questions again, creating a dialogue between students and teachers alike that promotes practices of negotiation and cooperation. Grounded in field research in China, this project first explores how China’s built urban environment, villages, as well as the spaces in-between, reveal a culture fraught with tension between its past and future. Looking more specifically at a site between the two northeastern cities of Beijing and Tianjin, the thesis proposes the reconstruction and expansion of the Mangdian Village Elementary School on the outskirts of Langfang. The craft of building is recognized as an important act of mediation, with their making a reflection of a society's values. From Pedagogy to Agency envisions how agency that can be cultivated in a space of learning, where a community workshop could be both the catalyst for the rebuilding of the school, as well as a source of long term empowerment of local craft. This intervention allows for a renewed understanding of the relationship with material ecologies around the site. As the school begins to embed these activities within its spaces, their dialogue redefines an education where a child learns to become a part of the world. While this process is filled with risks, moments of uncertainty, and will be endlessly challenging. The thesis ultimately posits this as the role education must play, for us to learn to be with each other, and for a shared future to be possible.
A Home Then, A Home Now
(University of Waterloo, 2022-04-29) Kopp, Natalie Jianyi; Hutton, Jane Mah; Bordeleau, Anne
This thesis explores how Hong Kong Canadians remember, inhabit, and imagine their homes to develop a process for positioning transnational belonging within the built environment. In response to discriminatory migration and zoning policies, historic migration from Hong Kong formed built networks of belonging and agency within Canada’s cities and suburbs that have been largely overlooked by Western architectural scholarship. A Home Then, A Home Now connects the past and present homes of five people who moved from Hong Kong to Canada between 1955–1975, to identify embedded material elements, transnational routines, and memories that relate to histories of migration. Drawing from migration scholarship and participatory methods, I worked back and forth with participants through a series of phone interviews to collaboratively draw their childhood homes and imagine changes to their current homes. We annotated these plan and perspective drawings with lived experiences that navigate spatial purpose, transnational networks, and Hong Kong Canadian identity. By generating spatial knowledge from unheard voices, this research records “other” histories to question dominant forms of architectural history, representation, discourse, and design. This process exemplifies how design disciplines can learn from everyday sites of diasporic memory to better record and imagine home in a rapidly globalizing world.
An Index of Groundworks and Bearings: Architectural lessons on foundation building in Vuntut Gwitchin traditional territory
(University of Waterloo, 2018-04-30) Kovalcik, Katherine; Bordeleau, Anne
The foundation mediates the relationship between a building and the land. It is a connection that is particularly challenging to ground in frozen soils. Bridging the Arctic Circle in the Northern Yukon, Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation traditional territory is situated between overlapping realities of the North and the South. The lives and knowledge of the peoples who have inhabited this place for millennia are entangled with a shifting land, one that experiences both changing seasons and increasing warming trends. Distanced professional ‘experts’ also engage these critical issues of environmental change through research and design. Within this dynamic context, holes exist in the dominant, arborescent decision-making models for foundation systems framing design as a problem, with solutions that privilege techno-scientific knowledge. This thesis is a constellation of work informed by architectural research, conversations, and time spent over the course of two summer seasons in Old Crow, Yukon, and my experience out on the land with local citizens who live close to it. Written from the position of a ‘not-knower’ – a visiting student of architecture and the land – this thesis offers a series of questions, attunements, and prompts for the designer. The work culminates in an index of annotated deep sections that detail the reciprocal relationships between what is above and below the ground’s surface. An Index of Groundworks and Bearings suggests a deeper reading of the foundation as a site of dialogue between buildings, the hands and minds that build, and the land. These exchanges, both voiced and silent, involve multiple ways of knowing and relating to the land. The index is a non-comprehensive illustrated inventory of foundations encountered in this region that float above the shifting ground or search for stasis deep below grade. It explores a multiscalar meshwork of projected abstractions and foundational relationships with the land that architecture might build on. Ultimately, the intention of this thesis is to open the visiting architect’s awareness of different ways to touch the land, while questioning the foundations of architectural practice itself.
Library : A Social Infrastructure
(University of Waterloo, 2017-05-19) Kohbodi, Seyedeh Parisa; Bordeleau, Anne
For many centuries, the mission of the library as a civic institution has been seen as the collection and dissemination of information. Likewise, the library typology continuously responds to the dominant paradigm of information and communications technologies. Following the digital revolution of the late twentieth century, information has been transcoded into electronic signals, thus allowing its storage and distribution to take place independent of time and space. Today, with access to information so ubiquitous, is the library a redundant place? In this thesis, I argue that by democratizing information, the library’s fundamental mission has been overcoming physical, social, and economic disconnectedness. The library, therefore remains to be an essential civic institution. However, despite making information more accessible, the digital revolution has produced new types of disconnectedness. Telecommunication and transportation infrastructures have accelerated suburbanization and decentralization of urban centers. In the current digital age, spaces of flow are valued more than spaces of place, resulting in a loss of civic space and suppression of diversity. Moreover, the infinite and simultaneous nature of digital information has incited feelings of inundation and disorientation. To address these new types of disconnectedness, the library typology is compelled to recombine and calibrate its historical traditions with a new set of expectations in the digital age. This thesis is sited in the suburban campus of Conestoga College, which is located on the border of Kitchener and Cambridge, adjacent to Highway 401. The specific and universal disconnectedness affecting this institution is investigated on three scales: suburban city planning, Conestoga's campus master plan and the library's design. Informed by these investigations, I have proposed an alternate design for the campus master plan and the library. The library itself is a manifesto for embodying the static character of containment and the dynamic character of flow. On a grander scale, by integrating the architecture of the library with a bridge infrastructure, we can expose the friction between the two spatial logics of flow and place, and provoke a multitude of movements and exchanges between the existing and new programmatic elements. This speculative intervention aims to reinforce the agency of architecture to counterbalance the consternations that are prevalent in the technocratic paradigm of today.
Mapping the City: Narratives of Memory and Place
(University of Waterloo, 2017-01-10) Geib, Desiree; Bordeleau, Anne
How do we discover a new place and begin to get acquainted with it? In Canadian cities, the sense of place can be difficult to grasp. The relative youth of the built form of our cities and a constant influx of new people from other cities, provinces, and countries continuously re-calibrate what place means. In Calgary, the sense of place includes relationships to its surroundings and the stories that are tied to the city. Ideas surrounding place are essential for architects who want to design while considering context. The question this thesis examines is: How can we learn about place, describe it, and share it, while respecting a multiplicity of experiences and histories of the city? The act of mapping is one of the ways in which designers can begin to understand and express a sense of place. This thesis explores the connections between place, memory, and narrative and how mapping can share these aspects of experience. Through mapping, four stories of the city of Calgary emerge from a mixture of personal experience, historical maps, and research. These maps begin to express place through describing official and unofficial histories, experimenting with material and scale, and presenting narratives of the city that come through lived experience in a place.
Natural Grieving, a Method of Preservation: Implementing Natural Burials in Ontario’s Greenbelt
(University of Waterloo, 2021-05-10) Hung, Chieh Yu; Bordeleau, Anne
We experience an incredible amount of emotion when death touches our lives. With death comes the complexity of loss and grief. The spaces of death, from the morgue, the funeral home to the cemetery, are significant components of mourning practices. They are the physical realms that lead us from one moment of grief to another. The space of death is designed for the dead, yet it is more important for those that remain living. These spaces resonate within the human consciousness, becoming places and memories. Identities and values all contribute to one’s relation with mourning rituals and death practices. This thesis outlines the importance of acknowledging grief and its social implications while examining the evolving religious and cultural identities of Canada. While our knowing of death rituals continues to change, the thesis leverages natural burials to reconcile with the land we live on and preserve the ground that sustains us. Through recognizing the contribution of the Indigenous people who continue to share their land with Canadians, we can also begin to restore our place within the land. Grounded on three inherent relationships: 1. the relation between our values and the way we mourn, 2. the relation between our sense of belonging and the landscape, 3. the relation between the deceased body and the burial site, the design proposal, Natural Burials in Ontario’s Greenbelt, will examine how burial spaces can be re-formulated in ways that reflect present-day values of increasingly multicultural cities of Ontario. From this, a new cemetery landscape emerges; reconciliation is made between the user’s emotion and the environment in which they experience it. Central to the work is also how implementing natural burials in Ontario’s greenspaces gives newfound meaning to land preservation and permanence.
On the Path to Material Re-Use: Navigating the complexity of material sustainability for architectural practice
(University of Waterloo, 2016-09-20) Beznogova, Anna; Bordeleau, Anne
The aim of this thesis was to understand how to define sustainability holistically, and how architecture can contribute to holistic sustainability by way of its material form. I conducted a literature review of definitions for sustainable development, looking for a holistic definition that addressed common attitudinal barriers to its practice. It became apparent that it’s useful to study sustainability under a systems science framework that takes environmental, social, and psychological sustainability as interdependent variables. In accordance with this, I reviewed different approaches to material sustainability in architecture, the lifecycles of several common building materials, and the links between material industries, to establish a system-based understanding of how material sustainability can be practiced. In the latter part of my thesis I focus on material re-use as an underrepresented approach to material sustainability, and study the opportunities and barriers in practicing it, particularly in the context of Southern Ontario. I propose that a monitoring tool that draws on public data sources could relieve one barrier to using reclaimed materials by making it easier to find available sources. I find that material re-use can be an architect-driven way to practice material sustainability, it conveys a message about the problems of materialism in our society, and it provides challenging but fulfilling craft-based work.
One Hand Occupies the Void
(University of Waterloo, 2017-06-15) Lam, Tsz Wai Eveline; Bordeleau, Anne; Revington, Dereck
The interconnected nature of void and matter and form is implied in architecture, but rarely explicitly expressed. Since the void is neither form nor material, it is difficult to define, but it occupies a critical role in urban development as the counterpart to the urban mass. The narrative of the modern city can be told through the presence of urban voids: the transposition of material and built form resulting in two typologies of the void, the found and the formal. The first exploration of the found void is dedicated to the analysis of the clay pit, the companion of bricks, which is often ignored as an unwanted by-product of the construction process. This deliberate exclusion from the urban narrative is reversed once it is rehabilitated as a formal void, which is valued as an element of urban development. The second exploration analyses the condition of the formal void, using the ceramic vessel to construct a domesticated spatial model of the monumental public space. The identity of the city is therefore analysed by making visible the imperceptible void through the documentation of traces and boundaries. The found void is a by-product of the city’s development and is not planned; it can also be described as a procedural void whose physical impact is rarely, if ever, considered as a positive influence on the growth of the city. From the economic point of view, its temporary use produces resources that transform the urban fabric, but the found void itself requires reintegration into the city either through erasure or reversal to solid. The analysis of the former, now filled-in, 19th-century clay quarry in east Toronto serves as the first investigation of the urban void, where the industrial process of clay extraction acts as a force that influences the form of the quarry and also the surrounding neighbourhood. The formal void is a tool that transforms the city through the imposition of a hierarchical structure derived from a deliberate absence within the existing fabric. The valorization of the formal void as a solution to congestion and chaos in the built-up urban structure is based on its perception, even now, as an ideal space that promotes circulation, light, and air. The analysis of an alternative vision of Paris conceived by Pierre Patte in 1765 expresses the interjection of the void into a pre-existing urban fabric and how its form is connected to the buildings that it displaces. The practice of throwing clay on a wheel depicts the reciprocity between matter, form, and void: clay is shaped into a hollow vessel through the interaction of the body. The found void, as a fragment evolving over time, is compared to the process of throwing and analysed according to the redistribution of the material around the perceptible void. For the formal void, the final pieces are used as models to express the circulation and tension that becomes evident when conceptual forms are given material bodies. This process occupies the intersection between the theory of the void and the material of the clay medium and thereby offers a critical solution to the architectural paradox that engages the nature of the profession and the approach to space itself.
Our Grand Domestic Revolution: (Re-)making home from Jaffna, Sri Lanka to the Greater Toronto Area
(University of Waterloo, 2022-11-21) Paranthahan, Mayuri; Blackwell, Adrian; Bordeleau, Anne
Displacement is seemingly irreconcilable with the grounding quality of domestic space; however, the practice of housework and homemaking allows forcibly displaced people to reconstruct home elsewhere. Centring the context of migration, this thesis analyzes the makings of home upon displacement as experienced by my family, who were uprooted from a Tamil village in Jaffna, Sri Lanka to the suburban Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in Canada from the onset of the 26-year Sri Lankan Civil War in 1983. Using five family homes as case studies and drawing from oral history interviews and secondary social and spatial theories, the research explores how the built environment organizes oppressions in housework practices, and how my family continues to make home within the spatial constraints. Historically, North American feminists have advocated for a radical socialization of housework in an effort to value domestic labour and extend its visibility to the public realm. This is evident in urban historian Dolores Hayden’s 'The Grand Domestic Revolution' (1981) which archives proposals by late 19th-century material feminists in America for transformed homes, neighbourhoods, and cities equipped with communal kitchens, laundries, dining halls, childcare centres, and other collectivizing strategies. Lacking in this approach to socialize housework, however, is the consideration of housework as necessary subaltern placemaking for racialized people living in a world ‘made white,’ or a world shaped by histories of colonialism (Ahmed 2007). This thesis, entitled ‘Our Grand Domestic Revolution,’ turns to a personal family history in search of more inclusive models for housework’s liberation. By spatially analyzing my family’s informal housework practices, I reveal how space can foster subjectivity for newcomers. This re-frames housework not solely as a source of oppression, as perceived in the Western feminist discourse, but simultaneously as an act of resistance through the making of an affirming domestic space for racialized refugees and their children. The findings reveal how the architecture and urban design of homes in the GTA, influenced by ideals of whiteness, become tools for negotiating insecure identities upon and after displacement. The application of these findings by designers (architects, urban planners, policy makers, etc.) can point towards alternative spatial frameworks that culturally re-value housework and allow liberation to be fostered at home.
People, Flour, Water, Salt: Bread and Community in Urban Public Space
(University of Waterloo, 2019-06-25) Piotrowski, Michelle; Bordeleau, Anne
People, Flour, Water, Salt is a proposal for re-thinking the ways in which we connect to and learn from one another in urban public space. Bread is a staple food and cultural artifact, and its production exemplifies the changing dynamics between people, cities, and land across cultures, regions, and time. By focusing on bread as a means to develop community relationships at the micro scale (the person-to-person interactions), we can also begin to examine its effects across various types and scales of exchanges. The process of bread-making then, which begins at the level of enzymes and bacteria, quickly expands to occupy a place of significance at the macro scale, and demands consideration and care for the future of our cities and environments. This thesis proposes the implementation of communal bake ovens in the urban environment to support the development of diverse communities through public and productive space centred around the numerous and varied conceptions of bread. The relationships fostered through shared knowledge, culture, and food in these public spaces serve to mitigate the social isolation and decreased agency that new, immigrant, and low-income populations often experience. Through the introduction of an urban flour mill, the project also challenges the physical and psychological detachment between people and wheat that resulted from the framework of industrialized flour originating in the 19th century, and re-establishes the prominence of local food systems. Following an examination of the historical impact of the growth of wheat and production of bread on the design and organization of cities, the thesis suggests ways in which these processes can inform the shape and character of the city today. Calgary, a city with a growing immigrant population and a rich historical and ongoing relationship with wheat production in Canada, forms the site of the architectural intervention. The design proposal explores the dichotomy between the technical and intuitive natures of bread, and its translation to architectural form through the consideration of materiality, visibility, the physiologies of bread and wheat, microclimates, and the unique thermal gradients of the communal ovens. The built forms and productive landscapes of a larger network of bread in Calgary aim to not only shape the physical environments of the communities in which they reside, but to generate a new narrative surrounding the production and role of bread in a diverse and growing city.
The Poetics of Dwelling: China’s Courtyard Homes
(University of Waterloo, 2017-09-28) Huang, Danqing; Bordeleau, Anne
Dwelling is a notion that describes the feeling of returning home to utter belonging and calmness at the end of an endeavour. It is a notion that differentiates a mere shelter versus a home because we develop intimate relationships with the spaces within. The spiritual characteristics that are associated with dwelling exceed the analytical description of space. It is an expression of how we live. In the context of a modern metropolitan such as Shanghai, the city is extremely dense in population and functions at an accelerated pace. During the age of the technological revolution, citizens can network with others on a variety of platforms on a daily basis, causing them to be in a constant state of mobility. The main intention of recent residential developments is to build rapidly to meet the demands of the growing population, and residential architecture often becomes the by-product of modern construction methods. The current housing market consists of monolithic neighbourhood blocks featuring very rigid unit layouts. These units do not allow the resident to appropriate the space, hence prevents them from building a personal connection to their home. In this thesis, I argue that there is a lack of concern for the spiritual aspects of dwelling in the modern housing market of China. Instead, the home should play the role of a touch-down place within this accelerated environment, providing a slow space for rewind at the end of a busy day. There is an extensive philosophy behind the idea of dwelling throughout the Chinese history. The courtyard home as the most iconic type of housing aims to create a versatile home that is appropriable in both elements of architecture and nature. Every family can easily implement their values and preferences into the home and create a personal utopia. The courtyard manages to combine all elements of the earth into one holistic space. The qualities of the traditional courtyard home can potentially fulfil what is lacking in the current housing market of China. This thesis will analyse the qualities of dwelling in its spiritual connotation and how it can be translated into dwellings of the 21st Century Shanghai and propose a contemporary housing project utilising ideologies of dwelling from Chinese courtyard homes.
Reconnecting Sarajevo: The Bentbaša Spine
(University of Waterloo, 2019-01-23) Mucibabic, Elena; Bordeleau, Anne
Sarajevo’s Bentbaša, a bathing complex of natural and artificial pools on the Eastern edge of Sarajevo, sits on the brink of the Miljacka River. As a marker of the boundary between nature and the city, the site has been present in the city’s history since the 15th century, prior to Sarajevo’s founding. While Bentbaša has changed consistently in use throughout the turbulent history of the city, it has managed to maintain a sincere neutrality, as a place of pleasure and gathering through the various conquests and socio-political tensions that have ruled Sarajevo and continue to endure today. Between 1992 and 1996, Sarajevo experienced one of the ugliest wars in the modern history. During that period, known as the ‘Sarajevo Siege’, the city was completely cut off, exposed to enormous military destruction and a population left without elementary needs. At the rare times of seize fire, during the hot summer months, Bentbaša remained to be a place where people attempted to find inner peace, alleviate the stress and cool down in the pools or Miljacka river. Unfortunately, after the devastations of the Sarajevo Siege, the area surrounding Bentbaša was left in a state of dissolution. The pools became decrepit, and the entire zone became a place where people in the city do not wander anymore. As a result, Bentbaša today, remains an under-utilized resource for the city. This thesis therefore proposes a re-conceptualization of the Bentbaša site, which has held such a rich place in the history of Sarajevo throughout all times. By re-imagining Bentbaša as a new public path or spine, this thesis will explore the site for its unique potential to engage both the history of the city and its ability to alleviate the tensions and socio-cultural nuances that dominate the city today. Using the architectural gestures of ‘The Path’, ‘The Bridge', and ‘The Pools’, the new Bentbaša spine will emerge. The path will embrace movement, the bridge will suggest connection, and the new pools will become a place to pause, submerge and heal. Thus, by re-enabling Bentbaša to become an important social node, or place of gathering, as it used to be in the past, this thesis will explore how the site can once again become a prominent gateway and juncture between the city, nature, and river which it binds.
The River is for Washing Carpets
(University of Waterloo, 2017-09-25) Lakhani, Safira; Bordeleau, Anne; El Khafif, Mona
Contemporary peacebuilding, notably as it is practiced in Afghanistan, consistently fails to address local needs in favour of international priorities for global security. Despite the significant presence of foreign agencies and aid mechanisms in the country, peace in Afghanistan remains elusive. Any semblance of peace achieved is neither durable, nor sustainable, particularly because of international ignorance of on-the-ground environmental and social realities, with specific reference to natural resource management and gender dynamics. These failures are localised in Bamyan, a small valley in Afghanistan’s Central Highlands, most well known for its historic Buddhist complex, circa 6th century. An anomaly, Bamyan is a pocket of peace in an otherwise turbulent country, a direct result of global interest (and therein foreign engagement) in the preservation of eight archaeological sites in the valley. Yet the valley’s ‘World Heritage’ designation (2003) has ultimately prescribed a development policy that emphasises heritage conservation over local socio-economic livelihoods. In so doing, the people of Bamyan are still today incredibly vulnerable, subject to insecurity in their water resource base, which is further aggravated by a changing climate and transition to urbanity. Critiquing present models of peacebuilding, this thesis is an advocate for the agency of design in fragile states. Specifically, the thesis suggests that the intersection of architecture, infrastructure, and ecology creates a framework for sustainable development that is grounded in local conditions and livelihoods. Herein, peacebuilding becomes a bottom-up, pro-active process, engaging with, and responding to, the needs of local people as a means of building a paradigm of self-sufficiency. That is, the thesis strives for ‘positive’ peace, with the intention of cultivating relationships of solidarity between and among communities. In Bamyan, opportunity for this is found through shared spaces for water. Water has important ecological and cultural implications. Rehabilitation of water infrastructure is necessary to restore the valley’s denuded landscape. Ritual importance of water additionally provides occasion for community gathering and social encounter, both for men and for women. Women especially, are integral to the peace process as their presence, in Afghan society, enables the ‘family space,’ a safe, gender-neutral, and culturally appropriate space for informal, public community gathering. Accordingly, the thesis proposes a network of decentralised physical, ecological, and social infrastructures throughout the local watershed of Bamyan that seek to build enduring social and environmental resilience. Integration of vernacular and modern technologies capitalises on local knowledge and historical models of behaviour. Participation of the community in the building process moreover strengthens social relations, producing a shared sense of ownership in the peace process. This is explored through detailed design of one node in the network, a washing house along Bamyan River, which connects water and women as mechanisms for enduring peace, uncovering the potential of shared spaces for water to mobilise community solidarity, empower cultural identity, and build human dignity. Coupling ecological and cultural systems draws on the existing and the essential, and the thesis thus conceives a practice of design that can appropriately engage in, and foster, sustainable peace in fragile states.
Translating Encounters with Stone: Investigating Rubbing as an Ecological Method of Inquiry within Architectural Material Studies
(University of Waterloo, 2023-08-24) Woodall, Laura Leone Yamin; Bordeleau, Anne
This thesis situates the practice of rubbing within the context of an immediate geological feature in Southern Ontario, the Niagara Escarpment, as a site that is admired for its natural and productive qualities. Adverse to extractive and consumptive attitudes about geological expression, I engage in a discourse that centers nuanced encounters and temporal spectrums at the scale of the hand. Over the span of four seasons, I conduct multiple rubbings along the cliff face informed by multisensorial instincts as observation and inquiry. Allowing my sense of touch and curiosity to guide me, I open myself to an ecological dialogue with the material of stone through listening to the interactive elements. Temperature, humidity, and weather movements are captured within the rubbing process. Traces of flora, human markings, and rock deposits are captured within the paper and resultant rubbing. I navigate the Niagara Escarpment through memory, exploring rubbing sites through personal landmarks integral to my understanding of the importance of forming interspecies relationships. Adapted from the practice of Chinese rubbings, I choose to experiment with the technical and affective elements of this rubbing process to exercise my observational lens. I explore ideas of placemaking through my intention to reconcile with my heritage and the landscape that is formative to my perspectives on materialism and my approach to spatial expression. Translating Encounters with Stone encourages the observation of interelemental exchanges with rock to decentralize acts of human-led practices. In doing so, this act provokes a case for immersive non-human led practices of material engagement. As an approach to reconciling ecological intimacy within a society of stone, rubbing acts to strengthen the environment-human relationship in the natural and built environments we engage.
The Unbounded School: Education Beyond the Walls
(University of Waterloo, 2020-05-19) Tat, Elaine; Bordeleau, Anne
Public education has long been a tool for state authorities to establish and indoctrinate societal moral and civic standards, a stance that has shifted in modern society. In Canada, provincial public education systems have undergone a series of reforms in the last quarter century in response to a competitive globalized world where data driven results, efficiency and performance are the central concerns. Education has become a tool to indoctrinate standards rather than a tool to liberate the mind. Evidence of standardization by ways of institutionalized schooling is visible in the architecture of schools. The resulting layers of material boundaries as wells as layers of bureaucratic protocols dissociate the school from society. This thesis seeks to challenge the intellectual and physical boundaries surrounding the architecture of education and asks: to whom does the school belong? And whom does the school serve? Through Hannah Arendt’s critical essay on modern education for mass society and Paul Goodman’s social criticism on the organized system and its effect on the youth of his generation, this thesis attempts to redefine the process of education as an emancipatory, life-long process for its students as well as a civic and collective responsibility for society. For education to become a means of emancipation, a school must become a material supporter to its students and teachers in their pursuit of spatial agency over their learning environments. The architectural exploration aims to reframe the design proposal for an urban high school in Toronto as an educational network that uses the city’s existing infrastructure as an extension of the school. George Baird’s architectural conditions of publicness provide the theoretical framework to unpack the implications of publicness in the role of education. The Unbounded School begins with a radical reconception of spatial boundaries that entangle the school with the city and education with the community. Ultimately, the school returns to the students and to the city, and the essence of education returns to its public and emancipatory mandate.

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