Monday and Thursday are studio days. On these days in particular, the third floor undergraduate studio is filled with a frenetic energy of design, research, and exploration. Students can usually be found talking excitedly with design professors and classmates in a habitat saturated with trace sketches, study models, and empty coffee cups. Every week we’ll share a completed project, churned out from this energetic studio environment.
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3A Studio | Urban Mountain by Howard Won
Studio Professors: Philip Beesley, Mona el Khafif, Rick Andrighetti
Studio Description:
In 3A Studio, we began the term with a visit to large building projects in Toronto. We studied a range of precedents, and developed our knowledge of the city sites by producing analysis documents and detailed studies of the urban fabric. With this preparation, we moved onto the final project of the term which was the design of a large urban building complex.
We were asked to produce the schematic design of a building containing a hotel, residences and an ‘innovation centre’ (i.e. a flexible-use space used for temporary and short-term business, creative and social activity), together with related restaurant/bar/banquet facility, commercial area, and fitness area. We were asked to design an architectural proposal that responds to its context, a context that posed a range of restrictions and challenges due to its dynamics. The site, situated in the rapidly growing condominium district in downtown Toronto, was surrounded by major roads, the Gardiner Expressway, a public library, and the Fort York historical site. We were encouraged to explore extension of the building design out into the surrounding area, which includes open space and built program explorations. We were to allow for continued functions of adjacent buildings including parking access, and pedestrian access, while independent loading and service areas were required for the new building.
The following is a proposal for the development of a mixed-use building located on the corner of Bathurst St and Fort York Blvd in downtown Toronto. The central scheme of the project revolves around an exterior public plaza and plateau, where by designating the site into four parcels and treating the ground floor massing as different buildings, alleyways and a public plaza were introduced to allow generous ground floor perforation. This layer of public space is then bled into the building by a public bathhouse, in which layers of intimate spaces were created to remediate the tension that exists between the occupants and the general public. Taking inspiration from a traditional Japanese bathhouse, the gesture is not to merely provide a public bathing space but also aims to energize the building fabric and occupancy through fine grains of social interactions.
