Slow Food for Thought

A Food and Architecture Blog

Western society is experiencing an unprecedented food revolution. A heightened awareness of globalized food production, local sustainability and loss of arable land to urban centers has become the catalyst to transform the current way of thinking. Currently, more than 50% of the food consumed in the city of Toronto is imported from Florida, California and Mexico, and travels an average of 1300 km . At the neighbourhood level, the emergence of farmers markets and community shared agriculture programs, as well as the voices of local celebrity chefs intoning the importance of local food sources are creating greater awareness of what we eat and where our food comes from.

This thesis strives, for better or for worse, to reconnect the inhabitants of Toronto with the land.

36 Strategems Towards a People’s Modernity

The design thesis is sited along the Shanghai Bund in China. It pursues an alternative modernity that is quintessentially Chinese by developing a design approach specific to the local imperatives and the contextual condition. This is achieved by first examining the development of Shanghai’s modernity, traditional construction principles, and narratives inherent to the site. Secondly, program components are reorganized for a tactical design application. The thesis concludes with a time-based and event-driven collective space that is sensitive to local culture while aiming to seed participation towards a local modernity.

The One Minute Theatre: Allan Wes Wilson

The following is an abstract of my intentions...What began as an ipod on the roof of St. Peter's has thusly evolved.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the correlative qualities between architecture and theatre. For millennia, drama has been used as a dominant vehicle for the investigation of those ethereal qualities which comprise daily life; operating as a framework for the deeper understanding of incredibly dynamic social, political and temporal relationships. To parallel an analogy by the English poet Ted Hughes; the classical dramas of the Greek poets have been conceived as quantitative elements which illustrate- which make accessible- the most intangible of human conceptions. However, episodes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have evolved the dramatic arts into to something more critical. As such they may actually provide the richest interface for the registration and projection of colliding ideologies, capitalist motivations and cultural histories. What this thesis supposes is that drama has the capacity to express a more fundamental understanding of the affects of contemporary architectures. The proposition is made for an architectural device which may chronicle the dynamic tensions embedded in a neighbourhood in crisis.