The Urban Quad: Reimagining Dalhousie Sexton Campus as an Open-Ended Landscape

Abstract

This architectural thesis proposes the Urban quad as a new architectural type to mediate between Dalhousie University’s Sexton Campus and its host, the city of Halifax. Drawing from typological theory and Stan Allen’s field conditions, it develops a method that treats form as emergent from contextual pressures such as: social, environmental, and infrastructural. Strategies include deploying fields of material, reinterpreting precedent, daylighting and systematic and rhythmic ordering of walls, floors, roofs and columns. The design transforms a surface parking lot behind the Halifax Central Library into a shared academic and civic ground. It incorporates existing structures, notably Gerard Hall, while introducing new spaces: a public ramped landscape, interior atrium, and split-level commons. Represented through axonometric drawing, the outcome is a layered, porous framework that invites institutional and public life to overlap.