Team Members: Jonathan Enns, Aleks Gontarz, Tony Kogan

“Projects Review 2019 features graduate and undergraduate projects completed during the past year by students of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. The exhibition showcases the creativity, craft, and commitment to architectural excellence that are internationally recognized qualities of the School. The Undergraduate projects are immersed in a full range of contemporary issues that span from the nuances of building design to the sustainability of urban precincts. The Graduate projects are distinguished by self-directed thesis work that examines the ever changing cultural digital poetic and political conditions confronting architectural practice in the 21st century

Sources questions the traditional project exhibition format. Inspired by the recent development of ‘open’ and ‘crowd sourced’ digital communication methods that turn viewers into collaborators, this year we look for ways in which gallery visitors can engage more deeply with student work”

The overall goal of this exhibition was to feature as many projects as possible in a condensed way, while giving the opportunity for visitors to dive more deeply into a project that they may find interesting. This led to the inception of the project panels and the “Smart Hooks”. Each panel has an overview of a student project; when placed on the hook, it projects more images and narration by the author next to it. One of my responsibilities was to design and manufacture the system and the Smart Hooks. The 3D-printed hooks have a built in Arduino micro-controller, RFID reader, and battery. When it reads the RFID tag of the panel placed on it, the hook sends a bluetooth command to the computer and projector across from it, to a Processing script which projects the relevant project media from the database.