DAS Instructor Scott Sørli Recipient of the Joe Zboralski Teaching and Community Service Award

DAS is proud to share that architect Scott Sørli, a long-serving CUPE instructor in the Department, has earned the Joe Zboralski Teaching and Community Service Award, which recognizes CUPE members’ contributions to building community among students and colleagues at TMU and in the broader public.

Scott Sørli teaches architecture studio in the Department of Architectural Science at Toronto Metropolitan University. Scott brings a strong ethic for compassionate community building, environmental concerns, and social justice, encouraging deep participation with the built world. His teaching practice concerns itself with moments when form and matter engage the economic and political forces that produce the city.

In his speculative teaching studios, students regularly encounter anthropogenic scenarios, preparing them for future mass housing developments in contexts as different as St. James Town, Toronto and Jakarta, Indonesia. During Covid, when we all were in self-isolation, he researched the air handling systems of his Department and obtained funding for a return-to-school Corsi-Rosenthal box construction group project, elevating the air changes in every studio to over ten per hour while engaging and empowering the student body. Scott has been active with a variety of communities outside the university as well, including YYZ Artists’ Outlet, the Toronto Society of Architects, the City of Toronto Peace Committee, and Pride Toronto. 

Scott’s continuous volunteer work with varied communities – be they architectural, urban, art, queer, and so on – has strengthened relationships among our TMU community and beyond. His current major social justice project has been the unionization of the workforce at the University of Waterloo, an extension of the labour rights of TMU to the last remaining group of unrepresented sessional faculty at a major publicly funded university in Canada.

Congratulations Scott!