Concrete Ideas: Material to Shape a City is about possibilities in concrete architecture. It visually speculates, through a series of montages, drawings, and photographs, about concrete architecture’s capacity as an urban catalyst, its capacity for defining cites and for virtuosity in urban renewal. It is another iteration of speculations begun in a graduate architecture studio at the University of Toronto, which asked: given the now mainstream nanotechnologies that transform the performance of materials at the molecular level without fundamentally changing the material aesthetic, can we anticipate and provoke a change in its inherent authority, perception, and aesthetic culture? The work uses the case of Toronto with its predominant 1960s and 1970s brutalist stock and unique minus 30 ºF to plus 30 ºF Canadian climate to test these speculations with building projects that challenge the limits of concrete performance. With contributions from architects and thinkers such as Mark West, George Baird, Will Bruder, and Charles Waldheim among others, Concrete Ideas is meant to create a seductive argument for the reconsideration of this age-old building material as supple, light, and instrumental in the re-presentation of existing concrete “citizens.”

• Editing and text by Pina Petricone
• Foreword by George Baird
• Afterword by Charles Waldheim
• Contributions by Jürgen Mayer H., Sarah Iwata, Graeme Stewart, Will Bruder, George Elvin, and Mark West

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Contributors Biographies

Pina Petricone is a partner with Ralph Giannone in the office of Giannone Petricone Associates Architects, a multi-disciplinary office best known for projects such as Osteria Ciceri e Tria, Herman Miller Canada, UofT’s Centre for Ethics, PCL Seminar Room, Inn on College, and re: TreetHouse – work that has garnered international recognition through numerous awards and publications. Her work and research centers around ideas of tectonic representation that test the relationship between architecture and cultural difference. With the support of an Arcus Endowment Grant from UC at Berkeley, Pina is pursuing a speculative design project entitled Boundaries of Difference: The Toronto Party Wall Project, which examines the enduring urban fabric of Toronto and traces the durability of its party wall as a designed object in old, renovated, and new constructions across culturally specific neighborhoods. This research has already become clearly distilled throughout her professional practice including the recently completed Il Fornello Restaurant in the Church Street (Gay Village) district of Toronto; and, the recently commissioned new Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. Giannone Petricone Associates is engaging more and more in urban redevelopment projects at a variety of scales, including the Don Mills Redevelopment and the Portland Street Infill project, projects which have fuelled the search for sustainable models of redevelopment and material research that experiments with a kind of “tectonic urbanism” at every scale. In this vein, the city of Toronto’s pilot project for Chester Le Public School and Community Space, presents a new model for shared public amenity and has allowed indulgence in questions of material culture. As an associate professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, Pina teaches design and critical theory at every level of the graduate architecture program, and has enjoyed acting as primary advisor for numerous award-winning thesis students whose proposals tend to question socio-aesthetic practices in architecture as urban constructions. Pina Petricone received a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Toronto in 1991 and in 1995, with a full fellowship award, received a Master of Architecture (II) from Princeton University.

George Baird was born and grew up in Toronto. After graduating from the University of Toronto in 1962, he worked for two years for Toronto architect Jerome Markson. In 1964, he commenced graduate studies in architecture at University College, in London, England, and went on to teach architectural theory and design at the Royal College of Art, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, returning to Toronto in 1967. In 1968 he founded his architectural practice, and joined the faculty of architecture at the University of Toronto. He has been active in architecture, urban design, and heritage preservation in Toronto, across Canada, and abroad since that time. A principal author of the pioneering 1974 urban design study “On building downtown,” he acted also as a key advisor to Toronto’s St. Lawrence Neighbourhood site planning team, strongly recommending both the extension of the street grid of the original city, and the creation of what is now known as Esplanade Park. In 1992, Baird was the winner of the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Architecture and Design Award, and in 1999, he was invited to deliver the annual Kilbourn Lecture for Heritage Toronto. In 2001, he received the order of Da Vinci Medal from the Ontario Association of Architects. He received the RAIC Gold Medal in 2010 and the Topaz Medal for excellence in architectural education in 2012. He is the author/editor of numerous books, including Meaning in Architecture (with Charles Jencks, 1968), Alvar Aalto, (1969), The Space of Appearance, (1995), Queues, Rendezvous, Riots (with Mark Lewis, 1995). In 1993, he joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where he was the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of Architecture, and Director of the MArch I and MArch II Programs. From 2005 to 2009 George was Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.