News

Environmental Design (EVDS) PhD candidates, Rozhen Mohammed-Amin and Kamaran Noori, joined an international project team rebuilding the city of Christchurch after the September 2010 earthquake.

Christchurch has been hit by a number of large earthquakes since 2010, damaging numerous buildings in the inner city, including the iconic Christchurch Cathedral. As a result of the severe damage to structural foundations, many of the buildings will be demolished to make way for new construction.

An interesting pair of statistics is that while less than five per cent of the surface of the Earth is developed at an urban density, Canada, with a vast landmass, is a particularly urbanized country, with somewhere around 90 per cent of its population living in cities. It’s pretty clear that there is a lot of space out there. Why, then, is density an issue?

Adam Legge, MEDes’99, knows what it takes to be a young leader in a robust city.

“You have to be really curious and ask a lot of questions, but also find the balance point between being open-minded and [having] a firm belief in what you stand for and where you need to go,” he says. “You need to bring diversity of opinion and perspective around your table. Find ways to help people do their best. And, be humble and admit error.”

This month, the first of what will be a treasure trove of data from the 2011 census was released by Statistics Canada. To nobody’s surprise, Calgary is growing, and fast! The news coverage was triumphalist, we’re-better-than-you-are kind of stuff. Perhaps that would be warranted if the end goal is to grow fast and get big.

Nick Puckett—whose work focuses on the design of embedded intelligent systems and methods for injecting digital, electrical, and material technologies into the design process—is at the environmental design faculty (EVDS) this week to give the Taylor Visiting Lectureship; an intensive one-week workshop for senior students. The lectureship was established to honour Dale Taylor, a past director of the department’s architecture program.

Sunnyhill Housing Co-operative (SHC) faces a very uncertain future. Located in a part of Calgary where houses cost on average of $650,000, SHC has to retrofit its aging townhouses just when federal support is drying up.

In late 2009, with support from the BC-Alberta Social Economy Research Alliance, students from the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Environmental Design undertook the “Sunnyhill Futures Project” to help SHC make plans for 2020. Co-op members asked them to address not just SHC’s dilemma, but to help housing co-ops across Canada to set new standards of socially, ecologically, and economically sustainable community.

A new bill that is being brought to parliament this week could allow police to read your emails, monitor your online activity and keep track of your movements via your cell phone.

Privacy advocates say that is the new Canadian reality if Bill C-51 is passed.

Many categorical problems of complexity and limited indeterminacy have already been codified through software as explicit informational territories [program]. Of crucial importance to these programs is their ability to mediate and reify informational bodies – inputting, conditioning and outputting data such that program-specific value and meaning are added to all three phases and posited as ontologically equivalent objects. Within this mode of design, the urgency for discretely structural strategies is paramount.

Albania, like many post-socialist countries, has experienced the rapid privatization of state-owned housing, rising housing prices in high-growth urban markets and shortages of affordable housing for low-income families.

Environmental Design professor Sasha Tsenkova is leading a group of international and local consultants to establish a legal, financial and institutional framework for a new model of social housing in seven cities across Albania.

With no meaningful heritage protection, the future of Calgary’s first skyscraper and its storied theatre hangs in the balance as a series of property owners duke it out in court.

When Calgary lawyer and theatre impresario Jacob Bell (J.B.) Barron set about building the city’s tallest office tower in 1949, he deliberately put a movie theatre at its heart. The Uptown would require two storeys, with a spacious lobby containing a large staircase. The theatre would have a steep rake, allowing all patrons an unobstructed view. It would have comfortable seats. It would use the finest equipment. In short, the Uptown would be the best.