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3A Studio | Large Urban Building, My L.U.B. My Love by Jake Read
Winter 2014, Philip Beesley, Mona el Khafif, Rick Andrighetti
Personal Statement:
I’d say that the value architecture can offer is in providing well connected spaces, natural environments and unalienating human experience. It should do this without taking a premium on cost and environment – because if we invent an architecture that doesn’t make sense to those building it, it won’t get built. If we’re not able to speak in their terms, our agency is gone.
We want to live lives that are intimately connected – let’s assume that we value the urban condition because a possibility for this kind of life exists in the city. Work is close to home, you pass the same places on the way, all of these environments mesh and play with each other. They’re disjointed but in some sense they connect over spans, and the fun is in those in-betweens – where the city presents possibilities.
So we’re given this site in Condoland Toronto: a mono-functional block of the city desperately lacking in the qualities we’ve just gone over. Save for the grocery store Loblaws is putting in south of the Gardiner, it doesn’t look like much life has taken root at City Place. It’s almost a suburban condition, an island between two major channels of infrastructure and two major roads, difficult to access by bike or foot.
What can we give to this place, and in that question – what can we do for tower living? Is the 60th storey of a mono-functional tower a place to call home, or is it too far removed from the urban fabric?
I wanted to explore a more dynamic type of tower, and look at where there is opportunity in incredibly close-pack cities. Is it sensible to locate public space and program above the ground floor, or is the podium-tower type really our best answer?
