York U.

York U.

Around Campus

YSDN

World Music Chorus

Design for Sustainability

Bachelor of Design2005-2009

Around CampusSpaces, people & activities

Vari Hall, seen inside here, is unify-ing space of York University. York can be seen as an architecturally cacophonous campus, and so Vari Hall is an essential unifiying space and elegant entrance to the institu-tion. It was designed by established Toronto firm Moriyama & Teshima architects in 1998.

Many student demonstrations took place in Vari such as the one fea-

tured in the above photograph. The aim of this demonstration was to raise awareness about the amount of garbage that students produced, by encouraging them to chuck their waste into the contained area. A stilt performer is seen in the back-ground, offering her services to attract attention for the issue.

Political protests also took place here, for instance between support-

ers on both sides of the interna-tional Palestinian-Israeli conflicts. It seems that Vari Hall acts as a spatial platform for the expression of stu-dent opinion and consciousness.

Less serious events have also taken place in Vari like poster sales, free hug parties put on by students, and on a regular day I’ve often walked by students playing hacky sack, gui-tar, or meeting to discuss projects.

Vari Hall—The Social & Architectural Focal Point of York University

The above photos are friends Megan and Piratheepan making faces for a class project. The photos were used on posters humorously reminding people to recycle. The class was Environment, Technology & Sustain-able Society with one of my favour-ite professors, Jose Etcheverry.

The picture on the left shows group members from my fourth-year Design for Public Awareness class, learning about the Markham & Eg-linton area’s history with John and Bianca, community representatives from the area. Classmates from De-sign for Public Awareness: Katrina, Kristina, Andrew, and Anna.

Public Awareness

Kim’s hair went through several phases during Uni-versity, from a curly perm as featured here in first and second year, to short, straight and funky from a free haircut at Coupe Bizarre.

Kim and I became close friends during YSDN. We went to Montreal together in February ‘09 for our first Couch Surfing experience, where we made good friends that Kim lives with now. I remember Kim’s dedication for her work by staying up all night in the labs to finish projects, and organizing committees for gradshow.

Kim & Tina

YSDNYork-Sheridan Design Program

Commuting, Gradshow Preperations,& the final Gradshow Night

Commuting to York University near Vaughan, or Sheridan College in Oakville was torturous from my east Scarborough abode. I literally spent weeks on my ass to get to class.

At least I was often accompanied by fellow YSDN commuter friends—time spent in transit allowed us to reflect on class experiences, project challenges, and also to just finally be social beings and get to know

each other. My fellow Scarborough journeyers were usually Julie, Amy, Ed, and Kim.

I had some specific memorable commutes, such as taking the train with Anna Romanovska from Sheri-dan back East to Toronto on a rainy day. She was soaked from biking from Sheridan to the GO station. I re-member offering her my apple juice because she was thirsty.

In fourth year Kim and I were in the same morning Workshop class at Sheridan and so would often try to catch the GO train together. It was always funny when one of us was already on the train and would see the other frantically charge towards the soon-to-be-closing doors. We would cheer for each other but secretly chuckle at the possibility of not making it. Good thing that we made it every time!

Commuting: design students as machines for sitting

Kim and Ed as brothas from anotha motha. Eugene as “Eugene Lennon” spreading his charm and autographs for the designers to behold. Ronald, as a super-cool-hip-ster guy you’d see in the Do’s section of Vice Magazine. All during grad show photo shoot fun-time!

Posers

In preparation for he Wonderlust Gradshow, fourth year design stu-dents created a fundraising event that took place at Bar 244 in March. Donated items were auctioned and the proceeds went towards funding our show.

Megan, top left, came to support the show as well as Kim’s sister May, seen knitting below. Akbar doesn’t look too enthused, at least Eugene is into the music!

Several bands came to play at the show; pictured left is the Nick Rose band, which were really amazing. I also met a jazz guitarist that night from another band and we ended up dating. It was a memorable event and a good exercise in fundraising.

Ultraviolet

Wonderlust—A Passionate Curiosity—May 10, 2009

The gradshow wordmark was part of a branding choice that aimed to capture that beautiful moment when one is in a kind of state of creative zen—wonderlust.

The gradshow experience was a blur for me: it came quickly and was over just as fast. It felt great to show-case four year’s worth of hard work, and see everyone else’s achievements. The external assessment, the ‘final exam’ of the gradshow experience, gave me mixed mes-sages about the professional design world: one asses-sor liked my work, the other was much more critical and didn’t really understand some of my projects. Ironically, when I began working at Quizative, the assessor who was more critical was my new colleague. I ended up learning a lot from her while becoming her friend.

Pictured top right are Anna, Kristina, and I: we worked together on the Scarborough Village Community Cen-tre Concept. Below that is June, with whom I wandered Kensington streets in -30 degree weather, putting up posters for the Ultraviolet fundraising event. Below that are two of my favourite professors, Brian Donnelly and his wife Mary-Ann Maruska, who I travelled to New York with and learned valuable methods of design thinking.

World Music ChorusExperiencing cultures through song

In the 2009 World Music Chorus taught by Judith Cohen, I learned songs from all over the world, such as Sephardic, Balkan, Spanish, French, Russian, Por-tuguese, and many more. We even had the chance to perform outside of the school at venues such as the Movement Centre.

This was one of the few classes where I felt that I made genuine emotional connections with people. Every class was relaxing, yet offered the challenge of harmo-nizing as a group in different languages. What a relief from my sore design eyes, to use my ears and voice in-stead! Furthermore, Judith told many stories in relation to the songs she was teaching us or the instruments we used. We were even invited to her house on one occasion for rehearsal, which contained a multitude of records, instruments, and concert posters from the ethnomusicologist’s many travels.

Instruments used included the zambomba, the drum Judith is playing on the right, which potentially incites sexual innuendos. (Apparently true players spit on their hands to lubricate the drum, rather than using liquids in fancy plastic bottles). We also played the bones, the spoons, as well as the bonhomme de jigeur, the little wooden man I play in the following pictures.

One of my favourite songs from the course is ‘Poko le dash’, a Sephardic song made up of a conversation between the families newlyweds, with the groom’s fam-ily accusing the bride’s of not giving a large enough dowry. It was funny performing this with the class and acting out the indignance on both sides of the family.

All pictures taken by Kimberly Tsui.

Friction Drum Magic

Design forSustainabilityGrowing opportunities for balanced cities

Changing the WorldJust before graduating from the York-Sheridan Design Program, I was accepted into a course called Design for Sustainability in the Built Environment. It was the climax of my undergraduate experience, because it was the most immersive, creative, and collaborative course I’ve ever taken. It was worth deferring my graduation until October for this experience.

In the three-week intensive workshop, I got to apply my design thinking skills to the projects and presen-tations for the course. Also, my colleagues were great and I made friends to last a lifetime. At the end of the course I had many of them over for a barbeque at my house, where Matt and Salam met. After the course, we still kept in touch with each other online and the following summer, I went to visit Oscar in Genoa, Italy where he was doing an internship with Renzo piano. Many students still talk to one another despite the

distances between them: some were from Japan, Mexico, India, or Costa Rica.

During the class, we went on many field drips such as getting to tour Whychwood Barns, a renovated streetcar warehouse near Bathurst and St. Clair that was new to me. We toured architecture studios such as HOK on King street. We got to know our learning base, the Earth Rangers Centre, very well through-out the class. Numerous guest speakers such as Jose Etcheverry enlightened us with real experience from the technical, cultural, and political sides of green building business and policy.

The final design charrette on our last day of classes divided us into three groups: Pitch, Technical, and Architectural. Within our own groups we worked with professionals to create branding, energy, and building design plans for the Las Nubes Conserva-tion Centre that York University recently purchased in Costa Rica. Some of the pictures of the BBQ in later spreads taken by Fumika Marito.

© 2011 Cristina Matei

York U.