A pair of Daniels Faculty students have won an international award for a pavilion they designed, which uses coloured panes of glass to raise awareness of global air pollution.

Rick Schutte and Mina Onay, both architecture undergraduates, were named regional winners in the "daylight investigations" category of the 2020 International Velux Awards — a biannual competition run by Velux, a manufacturer of windows, skylights, and blinds. In addition to a cash prize, Rick and Mina have won the right to present their design at this year's World Architecture Festival, where they will compete with four other regional winners for the grand prize in their category.

"It's so amazing, and so we're so grateful," Rick says. "We've been on cloud nine for weeks."

Rick Schutte and Mina Onay.

Participants in the daylight investigations category of the 2020 International Velux Award competition were required to submit designs that investigated the physical properties of light, using new materials and technologies.

Rick and Mina realized that they would need to take an unconventional approach in order to make their project stand out from hundreds of other entries. Both of them are minoring in visual studies, and it occurred to them that a visual arts perspective could be precisely the thing to give them an edge. The competition's rules required them to pick a faculty advisor, so they chose J.P. King, a sessional lecturer in the Daniels Faculty's visual studies program. J.P. is a working artist who specializes in printmaking.

"When Rick and Mina came to me, they didn't necessarily want architectural thinking to guide their project," J.P. says. "They were looking for someone who was more process oriented, who could guide them through the stages of thinking through a piece of public artwork."

The design process was complicated by the fact that the project team's members were located on different continents. Rick and J.P. were both in Toronto, but Mina had left the city for her home in Turkey in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and was unable to return. She and Rick ended up doing most of their collaborative design work on Miro, an online whiteboarding platform that has become popular with designers over the past few months.

Despite the distance, the pair were able to develop a sophisticated design that they titled "AQIP," or "Air Quality Index Pavilion." They developed the concept using parametric design methods.

The pavilion, which they envisioned being installed on a site on the Toronto Islands (this project, like most student competition entries, will not actually be built), is made almost entirely of four-inch-thick panes of glass that are precisely curved to create a maze-like environment that looks, from above, like the bloom of a flower. The striking structure straddles the line between architecture and public art, in the vein of large-scale sculptors like Richard Serra.

A chart, created by Rick and Mina, that shows the air quality indices of various cities around the world.

Under J.P.'s guidance, Rick and Mina researched the air quality index, a standard measurement of air pollution used in population centres around the world. They surveyed the air quality of several of the world's largest countries and took note of the cities within those countries that had recorded the worst pollution.

Once they had compiled a table of air quality index scores from around the world, they set about finding a way to represent the data within the built form of their pavilion. They researched the visual effect of particulate matter in the atmosphere and realized that excessive pollution typically causes the sky to take on an orange tint — a fact now familiar to anyone who has been following news of the California wildfires.

Rick and Mina decided that each glass panel in their pavilion would represent a different global city. Each of the panels would be tinted orange in proportion with the air quality of its corresponding city: the worse the air quality, the deeper the orange hue.

Top: A rendering of the view from inside the pavilion. Bottom: A view of the skylight at the pavilion's centre.

A visitor to the Air Quality Index Pavilion enters from the outer edge of the "flower," where the lightest-orange glass (representing the least polluted cities) is located. As the visitor progresses towards the centre of the pavilion, he or she encounters glass panes that are deeper orange, representing cities with poorer air quality. At the centre of the pavilion, in the middle of the whorl of glass, the orange is so intense that it's almost opaque. Bathed in orange light, the visitor has a visceral experience of the effect of air pollution on the earth's atmosphere.

At the very centre of the pavilion, the glass petals part, leaving a round, open portal through which a visitor can look up and see blue sky. "This element of the design was inspired by James Turrell's skylights," Rick says. "Visitors have the ability to look up and see the bright blue sky when they're covered with this orange light filtering through the glass. It's a hopeful moment at the centre of our installation."

The World Architecture Festival, where Rick and Mina will present their design and vie for the grand prize in their category, will take place in June 2021.